The LSE Directory / Trading software
QuantConnect operates a cloud-based platform for quantitative trading research, backtesting and live deployment, built around LEAN, an open-source algorithmic trading engine released under the Apache 2.0 licence. Users write strategies in Python or C#, test them against historical data covering equities, equity options, index and index options, futures and futures options, forex, CFDs and cryptocurrencies, then deploy the same code to live markets through the platform's broker integrations. QuantConnect also runs an integrated Jupyter notebook research environment and a managed data marketplace that layers third-party datasets, including AlgoSeek, Morningstar, Tiingo and Benzinga, on top of its own historical price history. Its central differentiator is that LEAN is fully open-source and self-hostable: a quant can run backtests and live strategies on QuantConnect's cloud infrastructure, or download the same engine and operate it on their own servers, an option closed, proprietary retail platforms do not offer. The company targets quants, students and small to mid-size funds building systematic strategies rather than discretionary chart traders, and supports live execution through roughly 20 broker and exchange integrations, including Interactive Brokers, Tradier, Alpaca, TradeStation, Tastytrade, Charles Schwab, Coinbase and Binance. In late 2025 it released Mia V2, an agentic AI coding assistant built into the cloud IDE that can propose strategy ideas, write the implementing code, run backtests and debug runtime errors without the user leaving the platform. Jared Broad began building the technology in 2011 while trading on his own account, and incorporated QuantConnect in Delaware in 2013 after more than 150 investor pitches were turned down; the company bootstrapped for its early years before taking on outside backing and later ran an equity crowdfunding round on Wefunder. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. LEAN's development is credited to a community of more than 180 contributing engineers, and the company states the engine now runs more than 300 hedge funds. As of mid-2026, QuantConnect describes its community as more than 516,000 quants, researchers and engineers who together run over 500,000 backtests a month, with more than 375,000 live strategies deployed on the platform since 2012 and roughly 45 billion dollars in notional trading volume passing through it each month, all by the company's own count. The platform's community strategy-sharing feature, previously called Alpha Streams and more recently Quant League, was retired at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 in favour of a redesigned Strategies section for sharing and discovering systematic trading strategies.
