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AlphaQuantClub

jimkliew

jimkliew

Professor
Joined
4/19/10
Messages
31
Points
18
Hello everyone,
I'm working on a new start-up Alpha Quant Club please have a look and provide me your feedback. It's similar to the Value-Investing-Club, whereby you have to propose a quant model/idea with back-test, if accepted; you become a member and have access to all the other quant models. It's geared toward financial engineering students but open to all.

Thanks again, Jim
 
I googled for the business model for VIC and this is what I found
Review: Value Investors Club | Investing, Raising Capital, Sales Training, and Recruiting with Social Media

I see why you want to copy that idea into the quant finance space. However, there are several differences from first glance and there isn't enough information on your site for me to understand what your business model is.

VIC is backed by some hedge fund managers who have capital to pump in it in the form of weekly prize. Members are required only to submit stock picks/investment plan.

What you require is for people to have a model working with back test data. If I have a successful strategy, why would I want to make it public to be used by someone with more capital? And what is the use of other idea where I don't have capital to start with.

Like VIC which targets active investors, you may want to target active day traders.

Thoughts?
 
Great questions!

Joy, thanks for the tip never heard of Algodeal!

Andy, also check out SumZero - the opposite of zero sum (competitor to VIC). Founders are good guys too.

As for why would you post up your idea/model, it would be to gain access to other people's ideas/models and input from seasoned investors. Since I know people who have been doing this for many years will never post-up their core-model or their "secret sauce," I'm going after grad/students who are more open and less jaded by the whole industry. New quants that want to break into the industry to get a job, to make lasting connections, and to highlight what they can do in terms of programming/back-testing/idea generation, etc. I'm looking for the best ideas/models but more importantly the highest quality people.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that many established quant funds are doing very similar stuff with some tweaks here and there...only time will tell. Moreover, everyone eventually runs out of new ideas...and will need to replenish the "brain-well." Finally, I'm more focused at non-funded models, as I agree with you if you have a money-making machine why disclose it?...but I think it's very, very rare to find a long-term-true-money-making-machine...things eventually get arb'ed away or break down..thus you need to keep at it in order to find the next thing...

Incidentally, we are considering creating dynamic investable benchmarks which members will try to beat...like FX Carry, Global Momentum, liquid stock mean-reversion, SMB, HML, etc.. It should be tons of fun!

Peace, Jim
 
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