The Future of Quant Trading

We’re often asked what the differences are between QuantConnect and Quantopian and so we decided to address this question here transparently.

At QuantConnect we have a vision for the future of quant trading. We believe quantitative trading will be the primary investment vehicle of the future. We plan to be the open source, community driven vehicle which makes this future a reality.

Our community is building the most powerful, flexible and encompassing algorithmic platform in the world. Our system is fast, extensible and can support any asset class or market. It can work on a single desktop or as part of a massive cloud cluster. For us, this is incredibly exciting and we imagine a financial future powered by Lean. Hedge-funds, mutual funds, brokerages and individual traders can use our open source Lean platform to power their automated research and trading. Do you want to be part of the future?

The folks at Quantopian have built an interesting hedge-fund, and it looks like a pretty good service. We’re looking to show the facts here without opinion and let you choose for yourself.

Data Support As a user, what assets can you backtest and trade, in what markets? What data resolutions are natively supported?
US Equities and Forex Tick, Second, Minute, Hourly, Daily	US Equities, Fundamentals. Minute, Daily Only

Backtest Processing Speed How long did it take to run a 10 year backtest; 1 minute, 5 symbol algorithm?
63 Seconds	17 Minutes 8 Seconds

Development Environment How easily can I create a real strategy?
Full Project IDE Parallel Backtesting Typesafe Compiler Auto-complete We empower you to backtest locally, so you can work in Visual Studio. Our local backtesting Getting Started guide takes about 23 seconds!	Scripts Only Single Backtest Only Auto-complete

Brokerage Support
Interactive Brokers and Tradier Brokerage Trade Live On Web+Desktop Interactive: $1 min, 0.5% max. Tradier: $1 per trade flat rate. Currently for QuantConnect users only.	Interactive and ETrade Trade Live Web Only Interactive: $1 min, 0.5% max. E-Trade: $8 per trade.

Objectively our data, technology and development environment out perform Quantopian. But what about the business? How do we stack up? These intangibles impact your experience as a user.

Staff / Company Team Size How many people has it taken to build this community and technology? What is the output/person ratio?
3 People You communicate directly with founders.	Approx. 31 People

Community Size What are the officially reported community sizes?
12,000 Quants Bootstrapped, organic, word of mouth growth	30,000 Quants

Funding How much funding was required to achieve this? How much money have we taken from external investors? How capital efficient is the company?
Built On Only $200k Angel Funding We’re funded by individual quant angels, who love what we do.	$24M Venture Funding

Business Focus
Infrastructure As A Service, White-Labeling We host your strategies; you are our client. We chose a business model where our interests are aligned with you, and you can be sure we’ll be here in 10 years. Our primary motivation is aspirational; we are building the world’s best algorithmic trading platform to be the infrastructure of the future.	Hedge-fund Recently Quantopian seems to be building a crowd-sourced hedgefund.

We’re proud to be maturing as a company; the open source community is growing, backtests and active coding is higher than its ever been. Its incredibly rewarding to see how people love QuantConnect! Join us to truly revolutionize and democratize quant finance.

The future of investment will be quantitative and we believe QuantConnect is the only company with the vision and technical ability to execute.

Best,
Jared
Founder @ QuantConnect

By: Jared Broad

Founder & CEO

07.06.2015