QuantConnect today announced the winners of its innovative Alpha Five competition, which started in October 2019. The competition was the first-of-its-kind, enabling a sponsoring hedge fund to solicit “designer” alphas from the crowd. QuantConnect, an open-source algorithmic trading platform, provides its community of almost 100,000 quants access to financial data, cloud computing, and a coding environment where they can design, build, and live trade algorithmic trading strategies.
Alpha Five gave quants the opportunity to submit their alphas for one of the following five universes pre-defined by the sponsoring fund: Energy, Precious Metals, Technology, US Treasuries, or Volatility ETFs. Quants submitted their strategies for the chance to win part of a $27,500 cash prize pool and the potential to be licensed by institutional investors for additional and recurring compensation.
Over the course of October, 102 quants from 21 countries in five continents designed and submitted 245 algorithms for consideration; the competition strategies’ beta ranged from -1.1 to positive 1.4, providing a diverse range of uncorrelated signals to the sponsoring client. The submitted algorithms went through live paper trading in November and December, and were then judged by assigning a score based on the Sharpe ratio and the realism of the model. QuantConnect selected a first-, second-, and third-place winner for the highest-scoring algorithms in each universe. The full list of winners from Alpha Five can be found here.
These winning alphas will be available to license exclusively by the sponsoring fund for the first three months. Alphas from this competition that did not win will be available for live trading and for any hedge fund to license on the Alpha Streams marketplace.
“We knew that this competition would be a compelling opportunity for quants to gain value from their ideas, but even we were surprised at the diverse range of strategies submitted,” commented Jared Broad, CEO and founder of QuantConnect. “During the competition, we saw a significant uptick in our website usage, which has continued to climb since the competition ended. This enthusiasm shows the great potential of this and future competitions for the QuantConnect community.”
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About QuantConnect
QuantConnect is an open-source algorithmic trading platform that provides its community of almost 100,000 quants with access to financial data, cloud computing, and a coding environment where they can design, build, and live trade algorithmic trading strategies. Since its founding, QuantConnect’s global community of quants from 160+ countries have designed more than 2 million algorithms, using QuantConnect’s fully open-source trading engine, LEAN. With its Alpha Streams marketplace, QuantConnect connects its hedge fund and brokerage clients with these algorithms to create revenue for quants. To learn more about QuantConnect, visit quantconnect.com.
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