2012 has been an incredible year for Quantopian. We’ve put together an awesome team, made huge strides in building the world’s first algorithmic trading platform in your browser, and our community has grown to more than 1,600 strong. I am so excited about the progress we’ve made this year, and wanted to both share some highlights and extend a thank you to everyone who helped, advised, coded, discussed and learned with us along the way!
As the year started our focus was on recruiting the very best team we could find to help build out the platform. That effort got a huge boost in February when Jean Bredeche joined me as co-founder and CTO and went to work to basically re-write the application. The next month we were at PyCon where we were a Startup Row winner. How’s that for a great vote of confidence in our vision and execution plans?
By May the team had grown to 4 people and in June we opened our brand new headquarters in downtown Boston. All summer the team was hard at work, preparing to launch a public beta at the end of August. By the time we went live, we already had 600 users ready to start developing, discussing and backtesting algorithms!
In September, we made another big improvement to the user experience by bringing backtesting into the editing page, making it super easy to test and edit from one screen.
At the PyData NYC conference in October, Thomas Wiecki gave a great presentation on our backtester Zipline, and announced that we had open-sourced the project. It was great to present our approach to backtesting to an audience of finance quants and Python experts. You can see a video of the presentation here. We also launched our Quant in Residence program in October. We’re always looking for new QIRs, so if let us know if you’re interested!
Quantopian hit a big milestone in the first week of November – 1000 users! (For the record, we now have more than 1,600 people.) We also hosted our first meetups to discuss quantitative finance. They were so successful that we’re planning to do them regularly. The next ones are in going to be in New York, Boston, and Dallas in January, with other locations to follow shortly.
As busy as 2012 has been, we have even bigger plans for 2013. (More details on that to come soon!) From all of us here at Quantopian, we want to wish you happy holidays and a very happy New Year. We are so excited to be building our vision of a transparent, accessible and creative way for quants to learn, connect and experiment; we look forward to working with you all in 2013!
[...] 2012 at Quantopian [...]