Coming Soon: The Hedge Fund Quant Marketplace from Quantiacs
Can't find a quant to develop your strategies? Meet Quantiacs, which is developing the Craigslist of quantitative strategists.

If the iPhone is responsible for the phrase ‘there is an app for that’, perhaps we can thank eBay for ‘there is a marketplace for that’. Breaking boundaries between supply and demand, online marketplaces which had initially been dominated by products have now migrated to services. Among startups in this fields, companies such as Airbnb and Thumbtack have grown their service oriented marketplaces to billion dollar valuations.
Aiming to crack another major industry with the formation of a marketplace for quantitative analysts is Quantiacs. Speaking with CEO Martin Froehler, he explained to Finance Magnates that their goal is “to disrupt the hedge fund industry”, of which quantitative trading based firms represent $300 billion of funds under management.
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To disrupt the hedge fund industry
To do this, Quantiacs has created a marketplace for quantitative analysts to backtest and share their strategies. These strategies can then be licensed by institutional investors who are only charged if they are profitable, with the standard 20% performance fee which is split between the quant and Quantiacs.
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With their marketplace, Quantiacs is aiming to provide a platform for any great quant to showcase its strategies and be used by institutional investors. For investors, Froehler explained that Quantiacs provides an opportunity for them to tap a wide ranging group of quantitative developers. As such, the product is being marketed to multiple types of institutional investors including hedge funds and asset managers seeking to add quantitative strategies to their existing portfolios and quant funds looking to integrate third party ideas.
Among the requirements to be listed on the marketplace are quantitative strategies with long term performance horizons. In contrast to high frequency trading where the strategies need to be continually tweaked and evolved, Quantiacs prefers systems that don’t require ongoing maintenance. Froehler explained that this is because they want to attract highly scalable strategies that trade futures, have multiple years of backtested data and can be relied upon to perform well for a multi-year timeframe.
Since launching the marketplace a year and a half ago with a trading competition of Stanford student quants, the marketplace has attracted over 700 trading strategies. The oldest ones on the system are those from the initial Stanford competition.
Currently, strategies on the system are being used to manage funds provided by a group of private investors, including participants in Quantiacs’ funding rounds. In the near future though, Quantiacs expects to launch the marketplace publicly to external institutional investors.
1) I wanted to confirm that you do not allow tick data for the backtest Only end-of-day data.
2) Is there any plans to allow mt4 or other front ends besides matlab and python?
Hi Jon,
1) Yes, at the moment Quantiacs only provides end of day data.
2) We are working on supporting other languages in addition to Matlab and Python. Next on the list are R and Julia. Right now we don’t have specific plans for MT4, but we’ll add it to the list if there is demand from our commuinty.
Cheers,
Martin