A startup called Quantopian just raised $6.7 million to turn anyone into a quantitative finance specialist. The company bills itself as the “world’s first algorithmic trading platform in your browser.”
What this means it that you won’t need specialized knowledge and a strong background in finance to make money on the stock market. Quantopian’s software lets you easily develop algorithms that could be used for automated stock trades.
The software is still in beta, but it has been used by about 10,000 people so far. It features an education component — you can learn about quantitative finance and explore the algorithms that others have shared. Once you’ve developed your algorithm, and you’ve determined which companies to track, Quantopian lets you test it against its 11-year history of minute-level stock data. The tool will inform you whether you would have made profitable trades in a real-world situation.
Once you’re confident with your algorithm, you can begin trading in the public markets.
Some people choose to share their algorithms on Quantopian. You can keep it private, however — the websites stresses that it will keep your intellectual property on lock down.
The site was founded by Boston-based John Fawcett, who previously worked at Tamale, a company that was acquired by Advent Software. His cofounder and CTO Jean Bredeche was an engineer at Tamale and marketing software company Hubspot.
Quantopian raised its funding from Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. To date, it has raised $8.8 million.
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