
Is Quantopian The Next Bloomberg? - pettazz
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/10/04/is-quantopian-the-next-bloomberg/
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bachback
Having worked for a 700M$ quant investment fund, I'd say, uhem no. It's pretty
simple: algo investing doesn't work well or at all. algo trading does. nobody
publishes very good algorithms. there are perhaps only 20 very good systems in
the world. usually they are statistical arbitrage or HF. these kinds of
systems are measured in sharpe ratio and turnover at least once a week.
although I've spoken to a 25 year old who managed to make a killing auto-
trading an emerging market, but these things don't happen at scale.

also, Bloomberg is in completely different business.

if somebody really wants to work on replacing Bloomberg let me know. this is a
huge market, which nobody is working on AFAIK (=~Angellist).

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dman
How do I get in touch with you?

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bachback
sent an email to the address in your profile

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kevinpet
Revenue per user might be high, but it's targeting a smaller market. Bloomberg
is useful to anyone who buys or sells stocks in any way. Quantopian seems to
be about people who want to find a technical system to beat the market. This
is by its nature self-defeating. If everyone is using Quantopian, everyone
cannot be beating the market. The article makes this very point on page two.

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tesseractive
At the same time, if this is a genuinely useful tool for its intended purpose,
there are lots of exit strategy possibilities. It might be worth billions to a
single hedge fund.

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dman
How many hedge funds spend billions on technology?

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peloton
They would if they found tech that gave them a clear edge and it made sense to
acquire from an ROI perspective.

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sukaka
I've been lurking on Quantopian for a few months. The algotrading community is
secretive. Currently, you code in python which is then saved and run on their
servers. I fear Quantopian copying the best trading strategies for their own
use. Even if you black box the code, all Quantopian needs is I/O with your
program. What's to stop this?

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dunster
We get this question at Quantopian periodically.

You retain ownership of the content you put in our system; everything you
write is yours. Your intellectual property remains private and your own. You
can read more about our policies in our terms and in our FAQ
([https://www.quantopian.com/faq](https://www.quantopian.com/faq) and
[https://www.quantopian.com/policies/terms](https://www.quantopian.com/policies/terms))

Of course, there is no way that we can prove or guarantee that we're not
peeking. Like anything else in the cloud, at some point it becomes a matter of
trust. That's why we did our About page a bit differently
([https://www.quantopian.com/about](https://www.quantopian.com/about)). We're
all startup veterans with reputations in the industry. You can click the links
there and find out who we know in LinkedIn, and see what they say about us. We
hope that our good reputations make it easier for you to trust us. Of course,
that is entirely up to you!

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bitcuration
Trust can take care concerns of credit card transaction, banking, or privacy.
But when it comes to trade secret, intellectual property, trust is irrelevant.
If you're working on trust, you're on the wrong path.

Traders need to keep their algo close to themselves. What you can offer is not
testing their algo on your platform, but separating the their critical algo
from the commodity data mining then offer the latter. The latter is what most
traders don't have and you can add value. The ability of separating the algo,
might just be your competitive edge.

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patmcguire
Can we please stop posting Forbes contributor articles?

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chollida1
I have a fair bit of insight into this world as I work in it and this quote
seems abit off.

> Now, 5% of asset managers are algorithmic traders. In a decade, 50% to 70%
> of asset managers will use trading algorithms.”

It may be true that if you include all mutual and pension funds that only 5%
have their own algos, and even that seems very low, its important to note that
these funds trade through other brokers like Goldman and Knight capital.

I'd guess that vast majority( > 90%) of trade that they do are done
algorithmically whether on a simple VWAP or a more complex "work it" style
algos.

Maybe the author meant alpha seeking algos rather than basic order allocation
algos?

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peterjancelis
In this space there is also
[http://www.quantconnect.com](http://www.quantconnect.com).

As a concept it can take off for sure, but not sure the Bloomberg comparison
is fully accurate.

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bitcuration
In that space, there have been many quant tools/online communities,
smartquant, openquant etc., let alone weath-lab, traderstation the old school
TA tools, yet none has taken off into mainstream.

In the algo trading field, nobody can beat HF. In the alpha seeking field, it
takes much more than trading algo, or a single algo. Complete computerization
is not impossible but definitely a very hard problem.

In term of creating a Bloomberg competing model, I'll not entirely build it on
algo based. There are numerous cheap highly educated labor out there in the
world, outsource it, fill in the gap where data mining is still not good at.
Only then, Quantopian will become a sound Bloomberg conteder.

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etrain
No.

