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Comment by PublicEnemy111 | Hacker News Reader

Is it common to use prop trading strategies for trading a personal portfolio? Or do quants almost exclusively work at hedge funds

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I've never met a quant trader trading for their own account. It requires some infrastructure that would be hard to justify unless you have lots of money to invest, and you're really good at it.

It is common for successful quant traders to be partners (have equity) in their firms, which means they are "trading for their own account" to some extent.

I think what he meant by "for their own account" was something smaller and personal. Not part of a larger pool containing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Definitely not common, but I run my own quant strategies for my own portfolio on a fully automated basis and have done so for several years.

Every other quant develper/trader I've met works at a fund or sell-side firm.

Would you mind detailing the platform/portal that you use?

Not sure what you mean by portal, but I wrote my own execution system that I run on a server located close to my broker and the exchanges.

Market data is via a consolidated feed and execution via my broker to a variety of venues. I don't run any high frequency strategies so 100ms from exchange data to execution is fine for me.

I use R for most research and strategy development.

Ah sorry, I was interested in what broker you use for market connectivity.

Also, are you able to detail where you source your market data from?

Sounds like a really interesting setup I'd love to know more about it.

I use IQFeed[1] for data. Despite their website, I've always found their product and developer support to be excellent given the price point.

[1] https://www.iqfeed.net/

Who do you use for execution? I wish I could use Interactive Brokers for server-side but, I think, that requires 100k and FIX connection.

If you're making any consistent profits these days with such a primitive setup, you probably have some pretty fantastic insights that you could be selling to a hedge fund or bank

The issue is strategy capacity.

There are many more strategies that will generate consistent returns on a few million dollars than there are that will generate the same return on a hundred million dollars.

This is a key advantage of being an individual and a problem every quant fund faces as they grow.

Like the other commenter, I'd be interested in learning more about your setup for your data feeds too!

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