During the unfolding financial crisis in 2008, we realized we had developed a significant edge: Having collectively worked for a combined 80 years on quantitative trading strategies and on the technology necessary to implement them successfully, we were fully equipped to create our own, custom-made setup to serve clients. – Michael Botlo, Co-Founder

One of the first things you learn managing investments is that diversification is critically important to success. We knew from day one that we needed to design, develop and deploy models across the global markets. To ensure we could effectively manage this global trading, we set up offices in New York, London and Hong Kong, each run by experienced locals. Collectively, these local teams work as one global team to ensure a quant based anywhere in the world can have her strategy trade 24 hours a day while she works on new research. For us, being global is more than just operational excellence, our collegial model means we actually talk to each other and share ideas (while open communications may seem obvious to most people, in the quant trading world we’ve found it to be pretty unusual). Having a diverse, global team of quantitative thinkers means the quality of the ideas we discuss is substantially better than if we were all just sitting together on Wall Street.

– Paul White, Co-Founder

Our founding partners have been running quant businesses together for almost 20 years. In order to survive and prosper over such a long period of time, we have developed a very strong business process that we use to drive our investment program. The process allows us to rapidly evaluate new ideas and move the good ones into successful strategies whilst controlling operational and investment risk. So, while ideas and techniques may, and indeed do, change over time, our overall approach does not, which ensures we can stay competitive with new market participants.

– Paul White, Co-Founder

Our constant goal is to heavily invest in research and infrastructure. For instance, when we started Quantbot, we had nobody to focus on using machine learning for alpha generation. It took us a few years to find the right talent to join us. Once we did, we guided them through our methods and set-up and slowly had them contribute to this new innovation that is needed to be competitive. Same holds true for our focus on sourcing new and potentially interesting but unproven datasets or our increased focus on computing-on-demand capabilities. We are, after all, at heart, a research and technology company.

– Michael Botlo, Co-Founder