Hello All,

We've released some pretty radical changes in the last month, starting with making the Alpha Market public. This allows investors with accounts as small as $10,000 to license code and deploy algorithms from the community to their trading accounts.

Alphas were previously only deployed to paper trading, and their signals consumed by funds by API. This provided a homogenous environment that provided fantastic stability and almost eliminated bugs. Alphas were regularly up and running for 6 months at a time.  

The Situation

Deploying to user accounts has provided a huge range of new challenges as every investor's account is slightly different and the Alphas weren't equipped to manage random capital allocations, holdings, cash currencies, and account-permissions. We've been scrambling the last two weeks trying to patch the edge cases as fast as possible but we've decided it's not possible to continue that pathway for now due to the high risks and instability it causes for investors. 

Unfortunately for now we need to restrict deploying Alphas to "single-purpose accounts". This means the account will be fully controlled by the Alpha; including any existing holdings. If investors have a larger account and only wish a partial allocation to an alpha; investors will need to create sub-accounts at their brokerage with a dedicated username and password and launch the trading with that account. I appreciate this is an unfortunate barrier to entry but the risks are too great to continue the previous "mingled" account design. 

The Plan

We have a plan to reduce this friction. We can use the Alpha Streams paper-account portfolios and build the point in time portfolio the Alpha is holding. This will then allow an investor to select N-Alphas; and we can do simple math to combine N-Alpha portfolios together, scaling them to the allocation requested. This will still be a "single-purpose account" but it would be one account for all alphas licensed. This has an ETA of about 4-6 weeks. 

 - Currently, freshly deployed alphas may not trade for many days while they build-up internal state; the modeled point-in-time portfolio would help solve this by instantly getting the investor accounts into the correct state on deployment according to the master Alpha. 

 - As it would also be one live server (or none ideally) it can reduce the costs to investors further by eliminating the need for live hosting and lowering their costs; hopefully leading to more alpha licensing.

Thank you for your patience with us over the last few weeks. We've been working incredibly hard to try and keep up and think this simplification that although a barrier is the best thing we can do without taking the marketplace offline. We've been really excited to see the quick adoption of the Alphas and can see it growing in 2021 to hundreds of millions in assets! 

Best,

Jared