This month we see our growing research community actively participating in the Lyxor-X-Alphien Alphathon as the submission deadline is fast approaching in 2 weeks time. Support sessions via various means have been organised to guide participants, especially students and new platform users, in getting familiar with Alphien platform.
Our research community is growing, especially in its diversity and quality
Two thirds of the new users are students from more than 30 schools/universities. One third are professionals. Alphien’s community and our reach in the academic world have definitely expanded, the profile of users has diversified and the seniority has improved. This is a core asset for asset managers to leverage on over the next few months.
From our many contacts with participants, we are getting highly valuable user experience feedback which will be key to further upgrade the platform and its user-friendliness in order to extract the best out of our talents.
Alphathon has boosted Alphien’s reputation in the industry
Our communication around the event - press release, interview - has had a good impact on promoting Alphien in the industry. Our Business Development team will be present at the Fintech Business Day in Paris on 7 November and has been approached by several asset managers for speed meetings. A good timing to build a pipeline of potential clients for 2020!
Support and training sessions specially organised for Alphathon participants
The whole of Alphien has been mobilised to make the Lyxor-X-Alphien Alphathon a great success. We have concentrated our efforts to give the best experience to users, as well as all the tools they needed to apply their research and find the best algorithm. Given the diversity of profiles, we have offered participants to attend live training sessions in order to get started quickly. Our quant team has worked closely with the sponsor to organise these sessions.
Overall, around 25% of Alphathon participants attended these trainings. The typical agenda covered data exploration and retrieval, strategy building using Alphien’s powerful backtesting framework, and portfolio construction using Alphien’s framework. Some participants pointed out the tools available on the platform were of industrial-grade. Overall, interactions with Alphathon participants were very insightful in order to understand how they apprehend the competition and what they expect to find on the platform. Consecutively to training sessions, average time spent on the platform and absolute number of active users have both increased over the month.
As the feedback was supportive, we have turned training sessions into webcasts, covering the same topics as the live training sessions. In order to keep the momentum going with the community, a new webcast will tackle the subject of incorporating macroeconomic data into a portfolio in a systematic way.
Join the Alphathon: Lyxor-X-Alphien Alphathon
Interested to sponsor an Alphathon with us? Contact us to find out more.