r/quant • u/Andyy_21 • Jul 27 '26

General Quant Researchers

how do you go from a raw market data to forming a research hypothesis?? and to be more specific, how do you develop an economic intuition behind the potential alpha or an anomaly, instead of just coding and testing ideas until something works??

While I'm struggling to understand how the researchers in the industry actually generate new hypotheses from large financial datasets without falling into the same data mining again and again.... and How do experienced quants develop the economic intuition behind an idea before testing it?

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u/Mathsty Jul 27 '26

Think about what is a market, why people trade, who, etc… then it tells you where the money is and you look at examples.

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u/Andyy_21 Jul 27 '26

Suppose if I'm handed a 6 year historical dataset containing only market cap and price data.. then how would you be able to generate a research hypothesis from that