Quantitative finance research faces a replication crisis. Researchers publish thousands of new papers each year with disparate methodologies, datasets, and analysis tools that are challenging to reproduce. QuantConnect provides a uniform solution to these issues. Being able to review these under a cohesive framework will bring new levels of transparency and make the researcher's work immediately repeatable by finance professionals. 

We're happy to announce a new academic grant program to help address the replication crisis in quantitative finance. This program gives up to 500 researchers publishing a paper a three-month subscription worth $778 each. With this grant, they can implement their strategy and generate public source code that anyone can use to reproduce their results with our open-source platform on a uniform dataset.

In addition to the cloud credit grant, the best new papers and code implementations will receive a spot in our weekly research publications, QuantConnect Research. Each week, we publish research to 250,000 members of the QuantConnect community.

The challenge of replicating quantitative results stems from three core differences in implementation: what is the underlying data consumed, how is the asset being modeled, and what was the research process? How can QuantConnect solve these challenges?

Unified Data: Our cloud data repository hosts a clean, standardized data set updated daily. We cover ten asset classes and dozens of alternative datasets. Reports of data issues are posted transparently and fixed over time. Working from a standardized dataset makes reproducing the research substantially easier. 

Comprehensive Modeling: QuantConnect solves the challenging modeling problems in quant finance that most academic papers ignore. These include corporate action handling, mapping of alternative data to assets, spread and slippage impacts in trading, margin and portfolio modeling, borrowing costs, avoiding selection and lookahead bias, and margin calls. Out of the box, QuantConnect addresses these challenges, ensuring your work is realistic. Researchers can customize any of QuantConnect's models to fit their purpose better for test sensitivity. 

Transparent Implementation Process: Our standardized platform allows researchers to compare results easily; readers can clone the source code and replicate the studies within minutes. Factors can be tested in forward paper trading without code changes in our live trading environment. Each project gathers metadata on the research process -- counting backtests, coding time, and parameters to form research resilience indicators and dissuade the researcher from overfitting. Publicly disclosing this information will help readers understand the health of the research and reduce the likelihood of p-hacking. 

If you're publishing a paper or thesis on quantitative finance, please submit your application for a grant to support@quantconnect.com with the preliminary draft of your paper to be considered for a grant. Once accepted, you will receive a complimentary researcher seat, backtesting node, research notebook, live trading node, and $100 in QCC for optimization computing.  

We're excited to share this news and unlock a new level of collaboration and knowledge-sharing on top of our open-source platform and community,

Together, we can improve quantitative finance research for everyone,

QuantConnect Team