Algorithms platform aims to target typical challenges found in quantitative hedge funds Jonathan Larkin

Last month, Quantopian received investments from Point72 Ventures, the new venture capital arm of Steven Cohen's Point72 Asset Management.

Quantopian is a Boston-based company founded in 2011 that aims to create a crowd-sourced hedge fund by letting freelance quantitative analysts from all walks of life develop, test, and use trading algorithms to buy and sell securities.

Its new hedge fund, to be launched early next year, will tackle investment overcrowding problems through many alpha streams and constant research, innovation, and production of new strategies.

Talent and alpha decay

According to Jonathan Larkin, who joined Quantopian in June as chief investment officer from Hudson Bay Capital, Quantopian was founded to solve a number of challenges in the hedge fund business and the quantitative hedge fund business specifically. Jonathan

"The first is the problem in finding talent," he tells Opalesque. "Traditional hedge funds congregate in very few geographic regions, be it New York, Connecticut, London, Geneva. For someone who is not in one of those cities, it's very difficult to enter the industry.

Furthermore, if somebody doesn't have a particular pedigree or education credential from the limited number of schools that traditional firms recruit from, it becomes very difficult to find an opportunity. So Quantopian solves that by being a free and open platform for anyone in the world to come." v......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.