Started in 2009, Chacon Diaz & Di Virgilio Wealth Management is a fiduciary firm in Gainesville, Fla. With roughly $100 million dollars in AUM, their firm was originally constructed to use a mix of highly liquid passive and actively-managed investments across asset classes such as US and international equities and bonds, real estate, and commodities. In 2017, they began to focus solely on momentum-based investing, employing absolute and relative momentum strategies. In 2020, they migrated to QuantConnect to live trade their strategies after their previous platform provider closed. 

Chacon Diaz & Di Virgilio Wealth Management Co-Founder James Di Virgilio, CIMA, CFP, said the firm uses QuantConnect’s paper trading feature to generate all of their trading signals. The firm began using quantitative strategies as a means to exploit momentum trends while leveraging the fact that market participants can frequently act irrationally. The firm’s years of study of momentum-based trading strategies, as well as a desire to remain efficient, led to their shift in the last few years from manual to automated trading, James said. 

For Chacon Diaz & Di Virgilio Wealth Management, QuantConnect’s greatest benefit is the live trading functionality, something their previous platform lacked. James said previously the firm’s strategies were backtested manually every day to determine if a trade needed to take place. He said the ease of being notified through QuantConnect if a trade needs to be executed simplifies their process. 

“That’s really tremendous when it comes to stress-free trading environments — to know that I don’t have to keep running all these tests every single day,” Di Virgilio said. “I can just let it roll, and signal me when it needs to be done.”

James said the support and interactions the QuantConnect team has with its users is another factor for the success of their firm. 

“I think it’s really important to have real people behind the system,” Di Virgilio said. “The system is robust and it works really well as an institutional system for us.”