BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Five years ago, the startup Quantopian envisioned a free online platform that would allow people from all over the world to create institutional-quality investment strategies.
One key to the platform was a powerful and transparent system to backtest investment algorithms. The backtester, named Zipline, was born.
Quantopian’s Zipline backtester has been used to run eight million simulations by 140,000 members from more than 180 countries. And Zipline keeps improving with its open-sourced approach: nearly 100 members of the Quantopian community improved the tool, identifying and addressing 340 issues in the testing process.
“Quantopian allows for people across the globe to solve today’s hardest investment challenges,” said Jean Bredeche, Quantopian’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder. “The key advantage of Zipline is that the open-source community makes it better every day. Our powerful, high-quality backtester is vital to ensuring we can tackle those challenges head-on.”
The ease of use and quality of Zipline has enticed hedge fund researchers, investment managers, and trading desks to manage energy futures, cryptocurrencies, and U.S. and foreign equity markets without the high costs and high risk of building their own backtesting software. The popularity of Quantopian is demonstrated on GitHub, the leading community of open-source projects, where Zipline has received more than 5000 stars and 1700 forks.
“Transparency is another huge advantage of using open-sourced software - most people will only trust software that they can examine. Nobody has to take our word for anything, they can just go look at the underlying source code,” stated Bredeche.
Today, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are using Quantopian to educate themselves on quantitative investing and to create and test investment algorithms.
Earlier this year, Quantopian began allocating tens of millions of dollars toward the best investment algorithms developed by its members. Each of the selected algorithm authors is eligible to receive 10 percent of the net profits generated by their strategy.
About Quantopian
People everywhere solve today’s hardest investment challenges with Quantopian.
Quantopian educates with lectures, tutorials, data, tools, and our online community - all for free. Members from all backgrounds learn by researching and creating investment strategies. Members own what they create and get paid if their work turns out to be among the best.
With Quantopian, anyone can create and possibly profit from their investing strategies – regardless of where they live, their gender, their economic status, what school they attended, or where they work. The result: more than 140,000 people from 180 countries have joined the Quantopian community, testing more than 8 million strategies and, in the process, disrupting the traditional hedge fund and investment management business model.
Strategies created by Quantopian members are being licensed to manage tens of millions of dollars – with authors coming from five continents. The company has received nearly $50 million in equity investments, including a Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz and including renowned investor Steve Cohen.
To learn more, visit: www.quantopian.com.
