Welcome to the second installment of our “Meet Our QuantCommunity” series. In the previous edition, we spoke with Cheng Peng, a software engineer who creates equity statistical arbitrage algorithms for our Alpha Streams marketplace.

In this installment, learn about Stefan Jacholke, a QuantConnect community member with 13 public algorithms. Stefan, who lives in Switzerland but originally hails from South Africa, is a young entrepreneur with extensive experience in functional programming, mathematical optimization, supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and distributed systems in the banking, telecommunication, software development, and investment sectors. Stefan experienced his first financial success when he applied his background in optimization and machine learning to financial markets by creating adaptive trading agents. His focus is on applying big compute, causal inference, and reinforcement to trading on transactional markets. His interests include blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Stefan, who has been programming from a very young age, has a background in computer engineering and specializes in optimization. He has had a lot of exposure to the banking sector, as well as corporate and trade finance. Stefan started his trading journey with Forex, then later expanded to cryptocurrencies. For four years, Stefan has been honing his algorithmic trading skills, and, in 2017, he started a company dedicated to proprietary trading.

When asked what excites him about Alpha Streams, Stefan says he likes both the demand and supply side. “Sourcing alphas will be very useful, as we have developed a very nice optimization platform for combining signals,” he commented. “It also provides a very nice platform for distributing strategies that are not in our mandate, risk profile, or that we trade internally.”

Stefan’s favorite investing strategies are market making and arbitrage because they provide the most consistent returns. He also likes the more speculative statistical arbitrage and pairs trading. He prefers building volatility and risk premium arbitrage strategies, which he generally builds to be market-neutral.

When asked to describe one of his alphas, Stefan singled out Volatility Momentum. In his words: “It really showcases how a simple algorithm can perform really well, without requiring constant adjustment.”

You can check out Stefan Jacholke’s profile on QuantConnect here. Stay tuned for our next installment!