Quant Snacks - Democratizing trading

Hey all,

The past couple of years I became really interested in quantitative finance. I learned a bunch of interesting things from readings books and listening to successful investors and traders. I started to attempt to create my own trading strategies based on different time frames. On the higher frequency I attempted to do some arbitrage and market making. On mid to long frequencies I tried to construct portfolios based on different factors like momentum and quality.

The process for all of this is quite tedious as I spent a lot of my time reading papers to get ideas, writing programs to pull in data for analysis and backtesting, then writing an automated system to execute strategies.

What I think would be useful is if there were a platform that had all of the relevant data I needed in one place which I can then use to construct my strategy, implement it, and manage it.

For instance, with this platform I could grab all of the stocks within an index, find the n best and worst performing stocks, combined with any other factor such as price-to-book, long/short these stocks, and automate the process such that in 6-12 months I would close the position and repeat the process; A basic momentum strategy which I can implement in one place.

There is currently a big trend of growing market participants that are interested in trading. There are some problems that I currently see such as shady private groups that are constantly being advertised and just general naivety when it comes to trading. For instance, I have friends that have started to trade and they do it based on feel which ends up hurting them.

I believe that a platform such as the one I propose would at least give these traders a better shot in the market because it forces them to follow a system and they learn and implement strategies that are well researched without having to dig through academic papers. I can't promise alpha, but I can make the resources easier to access.

It's actually not very different from buying an ETF which is constructed to follow some of these strategies. But the caveat is that people want to trade and be in control of what they are picking. Traders gonna trade.

Curious to hear what peoples thoughts are on this.