Algorithmic trading

Client : Undisclosed hedge fund

Industry : Global markets

Context

Our client, a London-based hedge fund running cross-asset absolute return strategies, requested to create a platform for backtesting trading strategies. They purchased and provided us with 20 years’ worth of stock market history, accounting for multiple petabytes of data. They came up with a research paper outlining the fundamentals behind this strategy, a complex statistical approach enabling the calculation of complex signals behind the option selection mechanism. The backtest consists in calculating the strategy’s daily performances in the past taking into account realistic conditions ( transaction and liquidity costs ).

Idea

Given the amount of data considered, and the number of iterations needed in order to complete the task, it was clear that a cloud-based approach was needed. Aikyo created a complex pipeline in 4 steps. First saving all the raw data in an Amazon S3 bucket, using geography and dates as keys and subfolders. The second step was to process raw text files, filter the data, and denormalize them into the AWS NoSQL database ( Dynamo DB ) to allow strategic querying of the data. The third step was to compute mono underlying strategies and a wide array of signals. The final step was to compute multi-underlying arbitrage strategies by using signals for picking the most optimal options at each draft.

Impact

The first version of our backtesting platform took the form of a Streamlit demo enabling the user to backtest complex derivatives strategy using several petabytes of input data in a few seconds only! The second version industrialized our pipeline in order to take into account the delta of data added day after day, and run the 4 steps sequentially using automated jobs, allowing for this R&D platform to remain up to date without human intervention. We are currently working on connecting our platform with exchange APIs in order to allow live time processing of order books and live generation of orders and deployment of a trading robot based on this strategy.

Our use cases

Message sent

Thank you. We will contact you as soon as possible