QUANT JOURNEY  

Quant Strategies For Stock Pickers

Wall Street investors generally fall into two camps:

1. Fundamental — the Warren Buffett crowd, digging through 10-Ks and management calls.

2. Systematic — quants who let algorithms trade for them.

Until recently, the two camps mostly stayed separate.

The global systematic trading market has grown significantly in recent years, with algorithmic and quantitative strategies accounting for an increasing share of trading volume across asset classes. However, the technical barriers to entry remain high for smaller firms seeking to implement such approaches.

Cheaper data and better AI tools are helping narrow a once-wide gap between Buffett-style stock-picking and quant-driven algo models.

That shift has opened the door for new platforms to help bridge the two approaches.

Quant Journey, founded by physicist-turned-entrepreneur Jakub Polec, has developed a platform that aggregates data from over 70 financial sources and applies artificial intelligence to generate trading insights for hedge funds, family offices and proprietary trading firms.

The three-year-old project initially focused on delivering fast research and backtesting capabilities but has evolved to address what the founders see as a significant gap in the market: smaller financial firms wanting to implement systematic trading strategies but lacking the infrastructure and expertise to build such systems from scratch.

"A lot of family offices and hedge funds want to go into systematic trading, but they have no capabilities or infrastructure," Polec tells me.

Building that infrastructure in-house takes a team of three, one to two years, and around $2 million, with ongoing maintenance costs of $200,000 to $500,000 per year, according to Polec. The company's solution aims to provide similar capabilities for $50,000 to $100,000 per year.

The platform serves about 2,000 active users who access a private GitHub repository containing code libraries and data integrations. The system pulls real-time and historical data across equities, futures, cryptocurrency, and macroeconomic indicators from sources including Yahoo Finance, the Federal Reserve's FRED database, and CCXT for crypto exchange data.

The platform offers both graphical user interfaces for point-and-click operations and Python code access through Jupyter notebooks for users who prefer to write their own algorithms. Unlike some competitors that provide black-box solutions, Quant Journey emphasizes transparency, allowing clients to examine the underlying code.

The idea is to pair education with tools—giving both individuals and professionals a path into systematic trading. Posts include case studies on common quant strategies, such as factor investing, mean reversion, and statistical arbitrage. Tutorials are designed to accompany the codebase and walk users through strategies step by step.

"In this business, trust is much more important than anything else," Polec explained. "We give you tools you can trust. You can go deeper in the source code even to check how we made it."

The company is developing specialized AI agents designed to perform specific tasks such as systematic portfolio reviews and pattern recognition for trading signals. Rather than creating traditional dashboards, the founders envision their tools primarily serving other AI systems.

Polec brings experience from physics research at CERN and a previous machine learning startup that employed Wojtek Zaremba, who later became the fifth employee at OpenAI. The team also includes a former head of quantitative research at Point72 and engineers with expertise in cryptocurrency and optimization.

The company has attracted interest from several venture capital firms and angel investors but has not yet committed to funding, preferring to wait for better terms.

The company plans to expand its team and accelerate development with additional funding, viewing the current period as critical for establishing market position in the rapidly evolving intersection of artificial intelligence and quantitative finance.

Quant Journey is now shifting its focus from individual subscribers to institutional clients. It has drawn early interest from family offices and venture funds.

For more information, visit Quant Journey.

ICYMI

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