Quantopian was a company that aimed to create a

crowd-sourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digit ...

hedge fund A hedge fund is a Pooling (resource management), pooled investment fund that holds Market liquidity, liquid assets and that makes use of complex trader (finance), trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and ...

by letting freelance

quantitative analyst Quantitative analysis is the use of mathematical and statistical methods in finance and investment management. Those working in the field are quantitative analysts (quants). Quants tend to specialize in specific areas which may include derivative ...

s develop, test, and use trading algorithms to buy and sell

securities A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction. In some countries and languages people commonly use the term "security" to refer to any for ...

. In November 2020, Quantopian announced it would shut down after 9 years of operation.

History

John Fawcett John Fawcett may refer to: In the arts *John Fawcett (actor died 1793), British actor *John Fawcett (actor) (1768–1837), his son, English actor and playwright *John Fawcett (director) (born 1968), Canadian director of film and television *John Fa ...

and Jean Bredeche founded Quantopian in 2011. Over its history, Quantopian raised $48.8M from investors such as

Spark Capital Spark Capital Partners, LLC is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in the U.S. with operations in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Spark is a generalist VC firm with a portfolio that spans verticals such as consumer internet, enterpris ...

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is a private American venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004. The firm works with early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile technology, artifici ...

Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is an American venture capital and private equity firm headquartered in San Francisco. Outside the United States, it has offices in India, Israel, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. In 2024, Venture Capital Journa ...

, Point72 Ventures, and

Andreessen Horowitz AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

. As of July 2016, the company consisted of 45 employees, up from 20 employees in January 2014 and 12 in January 2014. As of August 2018, the company had over 210,000 members compared to 85,000 in July 2016, 20,000 in May 2014, and 10,000 in October 2013. In July 2016,

Steven A. Cohen Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge-fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball (MLB) since September 14, 2020, owning just over 97% of the team. He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Ma ...

, chief executive officer of

Point72 Asset Management Point72 Asset Management is an American hedge fund. It was founded in 2014 by Steve Cohen, after his previous company S.A.C. Capital Advisors pled guilty to insider trading charges. In 2018, the company reopened to external investors after a t ...

, announced his firm will put up to $250M under the direction of algorithms managed by Quantopian and make an investment in Quantopian itself. The company has funded individual algorithms with as much as $50,000,000. In February 2020, Quantopian announced it would return investors' money due to the underperformance of its investment strategies.

Business Model

The company ran a

two-sided market In mathematics, specifically in topology of manifolds, a compact codimension-one submanifold F of a manifold M is said to be 2-sided in M when there is an embedding ::h\colon F\times 1,1to M with h(x,0)=x for each x\in F and ::h(F\times ...

business model: The first side consisted of algorithm-developer members who developed and tested for free, focusing on algorithm development for factors that can be added to Quantopian's offerings to

institutional investors An institutional investor is an entity that pools money to purchase security (finance), securities, real property, and other investment assets or originate loans. Institutional investors include commercial banks, central banks, credit unions, s ...

. It hosted contests called "Quantopian Open", where anyone could join and enter regardless of education or work experience. Quantopian provided them with free data sources and tools, largely built in the

Python programming Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically type-checked and garbage-collected. It supports multiple progra ...

language. The second side was institutional investors. These members had their investments managed by the winning algorithms. Successful developer-members could get a royalty or commission from investor-members, who profited from the former's algorithm used with larger resources > $1M. Board member Andrew Parker claimed that Quantopian aimed for modest number of users and a large average revenue per user (ARPU); more like Bloomberg than Facebook. The business model capitalized on a trend jokingly dubbed "the latest DIY craze" by the

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

. Previously the company provided brokerage integrations to individual investors. These integrations were continued by the community who started the open source projec
Zipline-Live
In 2018, the company announced the availability of an enterprise software product for asset managers, in partnership with FactSet. In 2015, Quantopian's Director of Products, Karen Rubin, used the service in a study that showed that a hypothetical portfolio of investments in women-led companies would perform three times better than an investment in an index fund based on the S&P 500 over the same period. Her study was inspired by a Credit Suisse’s Gender 3000 report, specifically that "Companies with more than one woman on the board have returned a compound 3.7% a year over those that have none..." and yet paradoxically only "12.7% of boards had gender diversity." Writing for ''Wired'' magazine, Fawcett proposed that Quantopian be used as a

MOOC A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the World Wide Web, Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and p ...

-like platform for higher education.

Technology

Quantopian's web-based product was written in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

. Parts of the company's technology were available under an

open source license Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...

, in particular, their backtesting engine dubbed "Zipline." The uploaded algorithms of users remained the

trade secret A trade secret is a form of intellectual property (IP) comprising confidential information that is not generally known or readily ascertainable, derives economic value from its secrecy, and is protected by reasonable efforts to maintain its conf ...

s of the individual (unless the person chooses to publish them). The company claimed that its employees could not access the submitted algorithms (except in certain circumstances) and that protection was ensured by "alignment of interests". The company did however reserve the right to review the performance and other outputs of user's algorithms. Allowing users to run arbitrary code on its servers posed some unusual cyber-security challenges.

Termination of services

In October 2020 CEO John Fawcett announced, "I'm sad to say that we will be winding down Quantopian's free community offering over the next couple of weeks and on November 14th, the community platform will be taken down.... We know this is short notice.... Crowd-sourcing alpha was a moonshot and I'm deeply thankful that we had the opportunity to pursue the dream together for 9 years." After publishing the termination of its services for quants, the Quantopian team disclosed their intent to integrate with commission-free broker

Robinhood Markets Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company based in Menlo Park, California. It provides an electronic trading platform that facilitates trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds, options, index options, futures contract ...

. To fill the gap left by Quantopian, a number of traders have relied on

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

projects like Gekko and Freqtrade. The first companies to capitalize on the gap left by Quantopian were CrunchDAO, QuantConnect, and Numerai. In recent years, a group of cloud-based tools has emerged to service the needs of quants with a specific focus on

cryptocurrencies A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records ...

including 3commas, Mudrex, and Tuned.

References

{{reflist, 1=3, refs= {{Cite web , last=Keohane , first=Dennis , date=2014-10-08 , title=HubSpot goes public a week after Wayfair, raises $125 million , url=http://www.betaboston.com/news/2014/10/08/hubspot-goes-public-a-week-after-wayfair-raises-125-million/ , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Boston Globe , quote='I think HubSpot could be a company that produces lots and lots of entrepreneurs—lot of people who might spin out and start their own thing,' Hower said. Already alums of HubSpot hold prominent roles as founders or executives at InsightSquared, Quantopian,... {{Cite web , last=Cohan , first=Peter , date=2013-07-01 , title=Quantopian Wants To Turn Stock Trading Algorithmic , url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/07/01/quantopian-wants-to-turn-stock-trading-algorithmic/ , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Forbes , quote=Quantopian ... lets people build, test, and execute trading algorithms {{Cite web , last=Alden , first=William , date=2013-10-02 , title=Quantopian Raises $6.7 Million to Help Traders Make Algorithms , url=https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/morning-agenda-wells-fargo-braces-for-suit-on-foreclosures/ , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=The New York Times : DealBook , quote=Quantopian ... announced on Wednesday that it had raised a financing round from Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. {{Cite web , last=Gerhardt , first=Dave , date=2014-09-28 , title=Tech In Boston #16 with Karen Rubin: The Early Days of Hubspot, Learning VC and Building for Quants , url=https://soundcloud.com/techinboston/karen-rubin , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Tech In Boston , quote=Karen Rubin is Director of Product Management at Quantopian, a company that provides a platform for anyone to build, test, and execute trading algorithms. {{Cite web , last=Baker , first=Natasha , date=2015-02-20 , title=IACS Seminar: Quantopian , url=https://video.seas.harvard.edu/media/IACS+Seminar+Quantopian+2015-02-20/1_et37gyqb , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Institute for Applied Computational Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University , quote=Our platform is based entirely in Python... {{Cite press release , title=Grant Kiehne, Finance Industry Outsider, Awarded $100,000 to Manage by Quantopian , date=2015-03-21 , url=http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/grant-kiehne-finance-industry-outsider-awarded-100000-to-manage-by-quantopian-300045002.html , quote=Quantopian has awarded a $100,000 account to Grant Kiehne, the winner of the February edition of the Quantopian Open. , access-date=2015-03-21 , author=Quantopian , agency=PR Newswire {{Cite web , title=Quantopian, Inc.: CEO and Executives , url=http://host.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=183938290 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304032515/http://host.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=183938290 , url-status=dead , archive-date=March 4, 2016 , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Bloomberg BusinessWeek , quote=John Fawcett: Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer -- Jean Bredeche: Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer {{Cite magazine , last=Fawcett , first=John , date=June 2013 , title=Hacking Your Education: The Next Generation of Students , url=https://www.wired.com/2013/06/hacking-your-education-the-next-generation-of-students/ , magazine=Wired , access-date=2015-03-21 , quote=Our hope is that Quantopian can be another resource for smart people interested in quantitative finance, that aren’t necessarily taking the traditional quant path... {{Cite web , last=Kolodny , first=Lora , date=2013-10-16 , title=Why VCs Will (and Won't) Fund Niche Startups , url=https://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/10/16/why-vcs-will-and-wont-fund-niche-startups/ , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=The Wall Street Journal , quote=And Quantopian Inc. also raised $8.8 million to bring a browser-based, algorithmic trading platform to “hundreds of thousands” of programmers in financial services. The company recently hit a 10,000-user mark. {{Cite web , title=Quantopian Managers Program , url=https://www.quantopian.com/managers , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Quantopian , quote=Only strategies with 6 months of real money live trading track record on the Quantopian platform will be considered. ... Don't have a funded Interactive Brokers account to begin live trading? You can submit your algorithm to the Quantopian Open, a paper-trading contest... , archive-date=2015-03-24 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150324122436/https://www.quantopian.com/managers , url-status=dead {{Cite web , title=America's Most Promising Companies , url=https://www.forbes.com/most-promising-companies/list/ , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140124220117/http://www.forbes.com/most-promising-companies/list/ , archive-date=2014-01-24 , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=Forbes {{Cite press release , title=Quantopian Has $100M in Algorithmic Investing Trading Volume in May, Opens Platform to All Investors , date=2014-06-06 , url=http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quantopian-has-100m-in-algorithmic-investing-trading-volume-in-may-opens-platform-to-all-investors-262102931.html , quote=Quantopian is built around a community of more than 20,000 members. , access-date=2015-03-22 , author=Quantopian , agency=PR Newswire {{Cite web , title=Zipline , url=http://www.zipline.io/ , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=zipline.io {{Cite web , title=Quantopian Terms Of Use , url=https://www.quantopian.com/policies/terms , access-date=2015-03-23 , quote=Quantopian will not review, share, or otherwise make use of private Content except as specifically provided in our Privacy Policy or this Agreement. If in the course of providing technical support or other maintenance of the Services it becomes necessary for Quantopian to view your private Content, such viewing will be restricted to the very specific technical purpose. ...we may review the results of your backtests and live trading. We may review the performance and other "data exhaust" of your Content. , archive-date=2015-03-24 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150324133543/https://www.quantopian.com/policies/terms , url-status=dead {{Cite web , last=Cohan , first=Peter , date=4 October 2013 , title=Is Quantopian The Next Bloomberg? , url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/10/04/is-quantopian-the-next-bloomberg/ , access-date=2015-03-21 , website=Forbes , quote=For example, billion-plus users Facebook’s ARPU is about $2 and Bloomberg charges its 350,000 users on 120,000 terminals at least $16,000 per user. {{Cite web , last=McLaughlin , first=Tim , date=2013-07-01 , title=For financial geeks, a do-it-yourself hedge fund site , url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-hedgefund-idUSBRE96012A20130701 , access-date=2015-03-23 , quote=The Boston-based firm... , work=Reuters {{Cite journal , last=Tudball , first=Dan , date=2014-03-25 , title=Start Me Up! , journal=Wilmott Magazine , volume=2014 , issue=70 , pages=30–39 , doi=10.1002/wilm.10304 {{Cite web , last1=Kozlowska , first1=Hanna , last2=Antunes , first2=Xana , date=2015-03-17 , title=Companies run by women perform better , url=http://qz.com/361602/companies-run-by-women-perform-better/ , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=Quartz , quote=

ubin Pulau Ubin (), also simply known as Ubin, is an island situated in the north east of Singapore, to the west of Pulau Tekong. The granite quarry used to be supported by a few thousand settlers on Pulau Ubin in the 1960s, but only about 40 villa ...

was curious to figure out if you could correlate female leadership to superior stock performance {{Cite web , last=Wechsler , first=Pat , date=2015-03-03 , title=Women-led companies perform three times better than the S&P 500 , url=http://fortune.com/2015/03/03/women-led-companies-perform-three-times-better-than-the-sp-500/ , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=Fortune , quote='It’s based on a buy-and-hold strategy aimed at looking at how well women CEOs have performed cumulatively,' says Karen Rubin, Quantopian’s product manager. {{Cite web , last=Hickey , first=Walt , date=2015-03-18 , title=Significant Digits For Wednesday, March 18, 2015 , url=https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/significant-digits-for-wednesday-march-18-2015/ , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=FiveThirtyEight , quote=Karen Rubin analyzed the performance of Fortune 1000 companies... {{Cite web , last=Rubin , first=Karen , date=2015-02-11 , title=Quantopian - Research: Investing in Women-led Fortune 1000 Companies , url=https://www.quantopian.com/posts/research-investing-in-women-led-fortune-1000-companies , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=quantopian.com , quote=Credit Suisse’s Gender 3000 report looks at gender diversity... {{Dead link, date=July 2025 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes {{Cite web , date=September 2014 , title=Credit Suisse Gender 3000: Women in Senior Management , url=https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/index.cfm?fileid=8128F3C0-99BC-22E6-838E2A5B1E4366DF , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=Credit Suisse {{Dead link, date=July 2025 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes {{Cite web , last1=Rubin , first1=Karen , last2=Dunn , first2=Dan , date=2015-03-18 , title=How Women are Conquering the S&P 500 , url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJWLi7GHWgs , access-date=2015-03-22 , website=QuantCon 2015 {{Cite web , title=Quantopian , url=https://angel.co/quantopian , access-date=2015-03-23 , website=angel.co , quote=Crowd-sourced hedge fund {{Cite web , date=2012-11-06 , title=On Trust , url=http://blog.quantopian.com/on-trust/ , access-date=2015-03-25 , website=Quantopian , archive-date=2012-11-09 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121109123401/http://blog.quantopian.com/on-trust/ , url-status=dead {{Cite web , date=2012-12-19 , title=Post mortem of 12/12/12 attack on Quantopian , url=http://blog.quantopian.com/post-mortem-of-121212-attack-on-quantopian/ , access-date=2015-03-25 , website=Quantopian , archive-date=2012-12-24 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121224011152/http://blog.quantopian.com/post-mortem-of-121212-attack-on-quantopian , url-status=dead {{Cite web , last=Fernandes , first=Deirdre , date=2016-07-30 , title=5 things you should know about John Fawcett , url=https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/07/29/things-you-should-know-about-john-fawcett/tWQU4wztuAW6MiJYA960YL/story.html , access-date=2019-01-03 , website=Quantopian {{Cite web , last=Butcher , first=Sarah , date=2020-11-02 , title=Howls of pain as quant site 'unexpectedly' shuts down , url=https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2020/11/quantopian-shutdown , access-date=2021-08-22 , website=Efinancial Careers {{Cite web , last=Capelj , first=Renato , date=2020-11-05 , title=Quantopian Joins Robinhood to Democratize Finance for All , url=https://www.benzinga.com/fintech/20/11/18242600/quantopian-joins-robinhood-to-democratize-finance-for-all , access-date=2021-08-22 , website=Benzinga {{Cite web , last=Hunnicut , first=Pattom , date=2021-08-11 , title=BEST CRYPTO TRADING BOTS , url=https://www.benzinga.com/money/crypto-trading-bots/ , access-date=2021-08-22 , website=Benzinga {{Cite web , last=Lewis , first=Katrina , date=August 2, 2018 , title=Crowd-Sourced Quant Network Allocates Most Ever to Single Algo , url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-02/crowd-sourced-quant-network-allocates-most-ever-to-single-algo , access-date=2019-01-03 , website=bloomberg.com {{Cite web , last=Hope , first=Bradley , date=2016-07-27 , title=Steven A. Cohen's Newest Bet: Do-It-Yourself Computer Traders , url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/steven-a-cohens-newest-bet-do-it-yourself-computer-traders-1469592001 , access-date=2016-07-27 , website=The Wall Street Journal Investment management companies of the United States