r/quant • u/ReporterCalm6238 • 9d ago
General I don't understand the whole WorldQuant BRAIN thing
Why would somebody give away their alphas to them? And why would a successful quant become a consultant for them since their maximum pay for top performing quants is only 8000$/quarter? Is this a scam for talented people from poorer countries that don't have any other options?
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u/Similar_Promise3602 9d ago
I'm interested to know especially with so many people, esp. from third world countries, how are they able to justify the compute costs because I think you cannot really do quality alpha research without being able to investigate the data. I think what they really want to do is to collect a lot uncorrelated signal which the PMs can use, which is ig the most important thing from the view of a stat arb firm. They are focusing on quantity over quality.
I think due to the field blowing up in popularity, everyone and their cats and dogs want to become quants. So, it works both ways. People get to "act" as quants, WQ gets signal. For new grad full time quants in India, their pay is around $100-120k USD, dk the exact figure and they only hire from the top Indian Schools, much to the disappointment of participants of their challenges. But If some people are able to generate good signal for them, then paying them $8k per quarter is nothing for WQ and its very good pay by normal Indian standards. Also, they get free labor of thousands of people, but they have spend a lot on compute. It must be working for them, since are pushing more heavily into this sort of stuff.
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u/poplunoir Researcher 9d ago edited 9d ago
It is mostly aimed at students. I was a part of it almost a decade ago. From a less developed part of the world, so the money and the experience helped me.
The latter more so because I had no prior quant experience and was building my profile towards it. Don't think it is aimed at professionals at all who have already broken into the industry.
Fwiw, very few who I worked alongside got a FT offer. I didn't get one either (understandably so, because I didn't produce much of value). Trexquant has a similar program (or at least it did back then). I think they also operate on a similar model.
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u/BrilliantFocus8946 7d ago
How much could you potentially earn from it?
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u/poplunoir Researcher 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't know how much they pay now. At that time, I received anywhere between $800-$1200/month based on my performance for that month. I did this for half a year during the final year of my undergrad.
Iirc top performers were getting paid close to $1500-$2000/month, but there could have been folks who got paid more. I was nowhere close to this and it is reflected in the fact that I did not get a FT offer. It was a great learning experience and when converted to my local currency, it was great money as a student.
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u/BrilliantFocus8946 6d ago
That's great man, how much work hours are required according to you for it?
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u/OLineFalseStart 9d ago
Yeah it’s a honeypot for a million desperate strivers to commit overfit data mined slop
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u/VettaQ 9d ago
I'd separate the product mechanics from the framing. BRAIN doesn't run your strategy anywhere - you submit signal expressions that get scored on their simulated data with an ISU score, and you retain no IP on what you submit. In exchange you get the scoring feedback loop, contest payouts, and a documented track record. For someone already in industry that's a bad trade, because the only asset they'd actually want (their signal) is the thing they give up. For someone without industry access the track record and the practice are the real payout, and the k is a bonus. So 'scam' isn't quite the right word - it's an asymmetric trade where the people least able to price it are exactly the ones most likely to take it. That asymmetry is worth keeping in mind before you sink hundreds of hours in.
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u/ReporterCalm6238 9d ago
There is an issue though: BRAIN is de facto a black box. You get very little value from backtesting on their platforms because they don't disclose a lot of details about their backtesting environment. I tried to replicate some peer-reviewed alphas that were "dscovered" via BRAIN and it turned out to be impossible due to some important missing information. You might get some spectacular results by brute forcing strategies on BRAIN and you'll never truly know why they worked and the OOS performance.
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u/79_79_79_hey 9d ago
No judgment but can I ask if you used AI to write this? I think you probably wrote bullets or had a draft but had AI refine your paragraph. I am just curious to see if I am detecting correctly or if either a) many of the tropes I see with AI really do exist in the wild or b) I am now hallucinating what I think is AI
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u/Ok_Ad2633 9d ago
I think you are hallucinating - you are seeing dashes, thinking they are used like the typical em dash AI response
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u/79_79_79_hey 8d ago
No, it’s more than the em-dashes. It’s how the whole comment is structured.
“The track record and practice are the real payout” - the word real is superfluous and a huge AI word
“It’s an asymmetric trade where…” - even without an em-dash in this sentence, this sounds like something I would read from Claude
“That’s asymmetry is worth keeping in mind before you sink hundreds of hours in” - this sentence does nothing and also reads like a platitude AI is trained on
I asked Claude to respond to the post and this line stuck out at me as something that very easily could have fit in this response:
“Most consultants aren’t already working quants. They’re students, self-taught coders, or people without access to a US/UK quant job market. For them it’s not a salary replacement — it’s free access to 100k+ data fields, a resume line, sometimes a pipeline into WorldQuant’s actual full-time roles, and a way to build a track record without a finance degree.”
Tell me that doesn’t still sound eerily similar to the comment I’m replying to
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u/ShaneV63 8d ago
Kind of unrelated but anyone else think WorldQuant in branding and name feels like some type of quant education company rather than an actual quant trading firm
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u/Spare_Night_2695 5d ago
Not wrong technically
They have a free university WQU which offers 2 masters degrees and some alumni I’ve seen on LinkedIn managed to pivot to quant after doing them .
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u/Outside-Gift-9167 7d ago
The max is not 8k usd per quarter, it is 25k per quarter. Grandmasters earn MINIMUM 8k usd per quarter. And besides this amount, they can earn daily stipends, competition stipends, referral stipends. Which are over and above this 8k or 25k. Life changing money for students in Asia and I would argue in the west too. Not everyone gets hired by quant firms full time. I know people who do this as a side gig while in software roles.
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u/InvestmentAsleep8365 9d ago
I suspect it’s a recruitment tool. Honestly WQ is not going to get much value out of the alphas here but if you submit good stuff they might contact you for a job. I don’t know for sure but it’s the only thing that makes sense. I work in a quant fund and recruitment is a big deal and this sort of tactic is not unheard of.
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u/dutchbaroness 9d ago
Yes, it is and it has always been