At QuantConnect, we’re always interested in how our users are deploying our institutional-grade technology across a variety of diverse scenarios. With Organizations, QuantConnect is more flexible and customizable than ever before, allowing you to scale up and down your resource use as your team grows.

Ali Masoumnia attends Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and is the director of QUANTT, a student-run algorithmic trading organization founded in 2018 at the university.

Students interested in algorithmic trading apply to become a part of the QUANTT team, and once accepted, are placed in groups led by project managers. Each group develops their programming skills while conducting market research together throughout the year. They complete these small-scale research projects and produce write-ups available for public view.  They use this knowledge to implement strategies with simulated money in the club’s yearly algorithmic trading competition, using a weighted score of ratios to determine a winner and runner-up. 

Their experience using QuantConnect extends back to May 2019, after transitioning from a different platform. Since transitioning, the largest reward for the students is real-life experience in trading with the algorithms they spend the year learning and working on. With the paper trading feature, they’re able to get results that give students a more meaningful experience learning quantitative finance.

“It’s important for students at our age to not just be doing book work and charting our algorithms- being able to live trade and get real results lets us take our learning farther. That’s huge for us.” 

Ali noted that combined with real trading experience, the accessibility of data helps drives the platform’s success for QUANTT, 

The data, he said, is something typically students do not have regular access to at their level. Through QuantConnect, he and his peers are able to gain access to institutional-grade data and backtesting tools to facilitate their algorithm building skills and research they do during the year.

“Data is normally something you’d have to purchase or go through extensive lengths to acquire if you’re not in the industry. With QuantConnect, that data is available to us instantly.”