In 2019, the hedge fund space contracted for the fifth year in a row. In 2020, new launches have hit lows not seen since the financial crisis and fund liquidations are the highest since the end of 2015. The industry is in crisis. And as a small handful of global mega funds increasingly grow their AUM, so does concentration risk. In the global order book, this leads to a lack of thought diversity as a shrinking group of funds converge around the same types of strategies. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. The world is changing, and finance needs to catch up. 

QuantConnect’s goal is to unlock access to institutional-grade technology, leveling the algorithmic trading playing field and diversifying market participation. It was our founding principle and it remains our only focus today. 

As we’ve grown and evolved, so too have the needs of our users — necessitating our recent shift to better enable emerging funds to grow while finding new edge. Those market participants face an ever-growing number of competitive forces, from prohibitively high data costs, to complex software and expensive hardware requirements, to a difficulty locating talent. We eliminate those outside challenges so they can focus on what they do best. 

To help managers get out of the gate, our service offering is now entirely customizable to suit their unique needs and allow them to scale resources as they grow. The packaging of our differing services — backtesting capabilities, live trading nodes, compute power, and more — can be adjusted on a per seat basis, with increased coordination functionality among shared teams. Think the UI of a Microsoft Teams, but for all your algo development, deployment, and monitoring needs. When a firm can launch with tried and trusted low latency infrastructure and related support, they eliminate operational risk.

With the revamp of our subscription model, we lowered the barriers to entry to our Alpha Streams Market, allowing trading firms and funds easier access to licensing alpha — a means of crowdsourcing ideas from an international community of users. Data scientist talent is reaching a point of such demand that hiring more to expand one’s operation is cost-prohibitive. Our crowdsourcing of global talent circumvents this issue.

Discovering and researching new ideas to maintain an edge that can all too frequently disappear is where QuantConnect – as your cloud-based, low-latency tech partner – can greatly assist, regardless of your firm’s size or youth.