Quant Investing Review
Is quant trading software a goo alternative to traditional trading apps? After reading this interview with Tim du Toit, Head Analyst and founder of Quant Investing you’ll know for sure! He will provide us with insights to quant trading, quant investing and algorithmic trading.
In addition, in this interview, Tim will tell us something about the philosophy of quant-investing.com and he will also reveal some details about his personal way of dealing with the financial markets.
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What Is Quant Investing
First of all, thanks a lot for taking the time for this interview!
Please, tell us a little bit more about yourself.
When I left my banking job in 2012 I lost access to Bloomberg. I wanted to continue investing my own money, something I have done since 1987, but found it difficult to find a screener that met all my needs which were mainly as follows:
- Companies on developed markets worldwide (New Zealand to Canada)
- Large to nano cap companies
- Lots of valuation ratios (based on profits and cash flow)
- Lots of quality ratios
- Lots of share price momentum ratios
- Piotroski F-Score
- Market value (in different currencies)
- Average daily traded value (in different currencies)
- Magic Formula values (Joel Greenblatt’s book got me started with quantitative investing)
As I could not find a screener that met all our needs a friend and I decided to build a screener to invest our own money and the Quant Investing screener was born.
We launched the screener in September 2014 and have improved on it all the time based on our own research and the back test research we do all the time.
Quant Investing Screener
Which products and services does Quant Investing offer for private customers?
Our most popular product is the screener.
At the moment the screener database has over 22,000 companies in 36 countries (all developed markets world-wide) and more than 96 ratios and indicators you can use to find investment ideas.
We also offer a newsletter which follows a strict quantitative value investment approach and has strong systems in place to limit losses especially when markets start falling.
What are the costs for customers using your products and services?
Our cost structure is really simple and we do our best to keep prices low to make it is a good investment even if your portfolio is small.
- The screener costs €39.70 per month (there is a 21% discount if you sign up for a year)
- The newsletter costs €29.70 per month (there is a 21% discount if you sign up for a year)
- Together the screener and newsletter costs €49.70 per month (28% less than separate subscriptions)
We also have a very generous refund policy. You can use any of our products for up to 14 days and get a FULL refund. Even after that you can always get the unused part of your subscription back. No questions asked. This is simply how we would like to be treated if we were a customer.
Which unique selling points distinguish Quant Investing from other providers in the market?
Quant-Investing: By Investors for Investors
The screener is not just a product we sell it’s something we use every day to invest our own money. It is thus a screener built and used by investors for investors. Because of this we test and write about new strategies and ideas we find all the time. You can read about everything on our blog which is free.
If we find an idea or investment strategy that works we immediately include all the ratios and indicators you need to implement it in the screener. That is the reason why the screener already has 96 ratios and indicators you can use to find investment ideas.
You can see a list of all the ratios and indicators included in the screener and how they are calculated in the Quant Investing screener glossary
High quality up to date data
Because we invest our own money using the screener we make VERY sure that it is always up to date with high quality data. We cannot name our data supplier, because of contractual reasons, but what we can say is it’s one of the big data suppliers that large fund managers also use.
It is so expensive that very few individual investors can afford it. This is also the reason why we have made the screener available to other investors, because only together we can afford such a high quality data source.
What do your customers value most about Quant Investing?
It is mainly the great returns they have made using the screener and the newsletter.
Here are a few examples:
So I decided to give it a try and started using your screener to select stocks for my portfolio and it turned out to be by far the best financial decision I have ever made in my life!”
“Tim I want to which you a happy new year and thank you for your work on your screener. Last year (2016) I had a 21% profit, and I could not have done it without your software.”
“When I started to use the screener of quant-investing when my performance started to boost tremendously. I now do have the possibility to search for and to get a very quick view of the key figures that really count for an asset. Actually, the biggest risk of my future performance is probably not to have access to such a database.”
“The Quant Investing Screener is by far the best screener out there. It has many metrics / ratios that other screeners don’t have and which are predictive of future alpha.”
“The Quant Investing screener is, in my opinion, the best equity screener available to the retail investor like myself.
“Using the strategies recommended by the website, I have achieved market-beating returns that even professional investors would be proud of.”
What are the reasons to become a Quant Investing customer today?
As I mentioned we offer two products by investors for investors.
If you want to look for your own investment ideas (irrespective of what your investment strategy is) the screener is the right product for you.
You can use it to screen over 22,000 companies worldwide using over 96 ratios and indicators.
If you do not want to spend a lot of time on your investments but want an understandable really good time tested investment strategy the newsletter would be the products for you.
Every month we send you to up to six investment ideas of the most undervalued companies in Europe (incl. Switzerland, Scandinavia and the UK), Asia and North America that have the best chance of substantially outperforming the market.
We get these ideas from the best investment strategies we have developed, and back tests we do on a continuous basis.
All you need to do is log into your best day trading platform (or call your broker) and follow the easy to understand instructions in the newsletter (they are all on the first page).
This means managing your own very successful portfolio won’t take you more than half an hour per month.
We have answered the questions we get the most in our FAQ database.
Who is able to become your customer?
We do not have any subscription requirements or minimum subscription periods.
You can sign up for only 1 month if you want to and, if within 14 days you see it is not the right product for you, just send us a quick mail (no reason necessary) and we will give you a full refund.
Tim anything you’d like to say in closing?
Each investor has his or her own unique approach to investing and that is a good thing else we will all be buying the exact same companies.
Also investing is not a difficult skill to master but it is more difficult than it looks.
If you are interested in investing your own money my best advice is to ignore the popular media completely – read books and research studies by other investors that have been successful over long periods of time in up and down markets.
Learn from each of them but build your own investment strategy by taking the best from what you’ve learned that makes sense to you. Each person has a different temperament and invests in a different way.
But if you follow time-tested investment strategies and build your investment strategy on what has worked you cannot do anything else but have outstanding returns over long periods of time.
Tim, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer our questions. All my very best wishes for your business and for your personal life!
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