On April 3rd and 4th, Schonfeld held their PhD Datathon with Codewilling in New York City. Powered by Code Willing's CWIQ Suite, the Datathon was part of the second annual Schonfeld Early Engagement Summit, and allowed PhD candidates to demonstrate their skills in a competitive and exciting environment alongside industry professionals. Alongside Schonfeld portfolio managers and researchers, students helped to analyze institutional-grade datasets and develop quantitative models, made easier with the CWIQ Suite platform that enabled participants to efficiently build and test their models.
While the competition served to test the skills of the attendees, the post-competition discussions allowed students to engage in networking opportunities with members of the team, gaining insight into the fascinating culture and operations of Schonfeld. We are already looking forward to participating next time!
BLOG INSIGHTS AND ANALYSISQuantbot InsightsExploring the Intersection of Technology and Finance
On March 29th, Quantbot employees had the exciting opportunity to participate in the annual Carnegie Mellon Master of Science in Computational Finance (MSCF) Datathon, an event that brings together some of the brightest minds in finance and technology. This year, the same datathon took place simultaneously in two locations - New York and Pittsburgh - offering students a dynamic and competitive environment to showcase their quantitative and programming skills.
Quantbot mentors, including Zihao, Richard, Shrinath, Zexiang, Aditya, and Aneesh, joined a mix of undergraduate and master's students in Pittsburgh, while Ian represented teams in New York. Their role was to guide participants through the rigorous competition, providing valuable insights and expertise in quantitative finance and algorithmic trading.
The challenge for the students was to develop a model to predict daily stock returns using provided datasets. Their strategies were evaluated based on five key metrics: Sharpe ratio, maximum drawdown, total traded amount, up/down ratio, and overall return. The team with the best performance across these criteria emerged as the winner.
Beyond the competition, the datathon was a fantastic opportunity for students to interact with industry professionals, gain hands-on experience with real-world financial data, and refine their problem-solving skills. Our mentors had an incredible time engaging with the students, sharing their knowledge, and being part of such an inspiring event.
We look forward to participating in future datathons and continuing to support the next generation of innovators in quantitative finance!
BLOG INSIGHTS AND ANALYSISQuantbot InsightsExploring the Intersection of Technology and Finance
On Friday April 19, Quantbot was thrilled to participate in Schonfeld’s Early Engagement Summit PhD Datathon. Using Code Willing’s dynamic data processing and modeling platform, PhDs from around the country worked in competing groups to find and model alpha signals from pre-determined datasets. This event gave PhD candidates, whose disciplines ranged from Mathematics and Statistics to Economics, the opportunity to test quantitative methods on real financial data, and to encourage their future engagement in the Quant space.
Ashar welcomes PhD candidates before the Schonfeld Datathon
Quantbot employee, Greg, mentors his team through the Schonfeld Datathon
The winning Schonfeld Datathon team
Since everything comes better in pairs, the very next day Quantbot sponsored a separate Datathon at Carnegie Mellon, also powered by Code Willing’s platform. Participating students came from either CMU’s Computational Finance Master's program (MSCF) or their undergraduate Math program. It was a victory for MSCF since a group of their students took home the top prize, but the 2nd-place undergraduates were equally competitive. After introducing the students to each competition, Ashar Mahoob, Quantbot’s CIO, handed out the prizes on both days to the winning teams. We were thrilled to foster an interest in Quant Finance in all the students, from PhD to undergrad, and we hope they will consider it as a viable career option. We are excited to repeat our success in future!
Quantbot mentor, Rui, celebrates with her winning team at the CMU Datathon
The official victory photo of the CMU Datathon-winning team
Some thoughts from the Quantbot mentors:
Mentoring cwiq-team-central was extremely rewarding. They are a bright and enthusiastic group of students who worked together quite well and sought my guidance regularly. I think the most important lessons I hope the team took away are how rich the field of alpha research is in terms of the breadth of both datasets and the machine learning techniques that can be applied, and how powerful Quantbot’s platform is for quickly developing new ideas and evaluating their performance. – Greg Sternberg
It was a rewarding experience mentoring the winning team, cwiq-team-code. They were a group of motivated young professionals who were highly collaborative and eager to learn. I was amazed by the abundance of brilliant ideas they tested in such a short time. The Quantbot platform proved indispensable in handling these computationally heavy and data-intensive tasks. I hope this victory will inspire them to take on even more interesting and critical challenges that impact global markets – Rui Xiong, Datathon winning team mentor
And an afterword from our CIO, Ashar:
Quantbot Hackathon 2024 provided CMU's Masters and Undergrad students a first-hand opportunity to work on a real-life alpha research project, under tight time and budget constraints, using real world datasets. I wish I had had an opportunity to participate in such a project when I was completing the MSCF program at CMU years ago. The students had a fun day of learning and competing. Additionally, all the mentors were very impressed by how well the students coordinated the research process and were able to come up with out-of-sample model performance that was in-line with observed performance in-sample.
BLOG INSIGHTS AND ANALYSISQuantbot InsightsExploring the Intersection of Technology and Finance
Back on April 14, Quantbot Technologies, along with Schonfeld Strategic Advisors and Code Willing, had the pleasure of hosting a PhD-focused Datathon, featuring participating students from across the United States. The event started with presentations from the three data vendors that freely provided their data for the Datathon: Estimize, Wall Street Horizon, and RedGraphs. Each team was then given 3 hours to run backtests, using the data provided by the vendors, to generate alpha and develop an out-of-sample strategy.
Paul White, Quantbot Technologies CEO, gives opening remarks to the groupAshar Mahboob, Quantbot Technologies CIO, watches as Schonfeld Strategic Advisors CEO, Ryan Tolkin, starts the competition portion of the event.
Each team was provided with a senior mentor. Two of Quantbot's researchers, Keywan and Zihao, each mentored a team where they dispensed expert advice on how the students should build and tweak their strategies. The most successful strategy across several parameters was deemed the winner. Congratulations to CWIQ team Sim for your win!
Keywan, Quantbot researcher, mentors his team during the competition.Zihao, the other Quantbot mentor and researcher, advises his team during the competitionThe winning team: CWIQ Sim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkNf04Pz4mk
A big thank you to the team at CodeWilling for making this highlight video!