Today we’re unveiling a new era in power, flexibility, and access for quantitative finance. The QuantConnect Organizations layer allows anyone to harness our platform to launch a quantitative fund, scaling up resources as they grow. Previously, the technical and financial challenges of launching a quantitative fund have stymied new launches, resulting in AUM concentration to the global mega-funds. We believe this is detrimental to the public markets — the world needs a diversity of strategies to strengthen the book when the markets tumble. When assets are concentrated in the hands of a few strategies, the impacts are catastrophic when they fail. This needs to change to ensure greater stability in the markets for everyone.

Since 2012, we have worked passionately to break open access to powerful technology for individuals, giving them the framework, data, and infrastructure to compete in algorithmic trading. Never before has the playing field been so level and rife with opportunities for those who want to pursue quantitative finance. We now have billions in live trading volumes on LEAN (our open source desktop-cloud hybrid algorithmic trading platform), regular sponsored competitions, and Alpha being licensed from the community. It is a true meritocracy, with the best and brightest from all over the world building off each other in the QuantConnect community. 

As we grew, our community grew with us — many of our users now run start-up funds, fintech companies, or work in larger institutions with more intensive requirements. Because of the historical “one size fits all” approach of QuantConnect pricing, they were hindered in their efforts to bring QuantConnect to their employers or use QuantConnect in their startup.

The Organizations feature breaks apart the pieces of QuantConnect you know and love, allowing you to consume them as needed. Similar to AWS or GCE, you can scale up and down your resource use and only pay for what you use. The nature of scaling up use means that we can keep the platform affordable for individuals, while also allowing it to meet the needs of larger organizations. By better identifying the demographics of the community we can create the features that they want, and that can be made sustainable with a solid business model.

We aim for Organizations to lower the barriers to accessing the Alpha Streams Market by providing Trading Firms and Institutional Subscribers easier access to license alphas via a smooth user interface, reducing friction for licensing, and increasing the revenues for our community alpha-authors.

Our financial alignment with the community has always been a core value for QuantConnect. With the Organizations feature, we continue to be aligned with you. Our free tier will remain, allowing people to learn and grow as quantitative traders, while the researcher tier with live trading tools can be accessed for just a touch more than it is today. We plan to give generous credit to students, academics, alpha authors, and anyone who needs it.

We are invigorated by this next step in our evolution as we continue to build a global company, creating a meritocracy where your opportunities are based on your ideas and work, regardless of age, race, geography, or educational background. 

We’re grateful for the support of the community and commit to continuing to serve you into 2020. Together, we can build a stronger financial system that empowers everyone.

Sincerely

Jared

Author