6 Data Capabilities to Succeed in Quantitative Trading |

It goes without saying that “ability” is required for success. A baseball player who can’t hit a curveball or a software developer who can’t write elegant code doesn’t stand a chance of rising to the top in their profession. A certain level of ability is required to be the best in any field and the same can be said for achieving exceptional, consistent, and sustained success in quantitative (quant) trading.

Quant trading uses large volumes of data combined with quantitative analysis and mathematical models to hunt down and analyze small changes in price, volume, or market relationships to identify profitable trading opportunities. Successful quant trading strategies often rely on near-instantaneous decisions about buying or selling, market trends, and risk, making reliable access to a wide variety of data highly time sensitive.

6 Data Capabilities You Need

When it comes to quant trading, there are a number of data “abilities” that are prerequisites for both initial and sustained success:

Scalability: Do your data resources have the ability to respond and grow to meet your needs? Now, more than ever, the development of winning trading strategies requires scalability: Scale up to research new opportunities and take advantage of new strategies as soon as they’re identified, or scale down as research ends or old strategies are retired. In all cases, scaling needs to be both fast and efficient.
Flexibility: Can your system handle all forms of data? Does it provide an elegant and intuitive interface? The growing importance of advanced analytics, including AI/ML, makes it necessary that your technology is well-suited to a wide range of usage patterns. Also, the ways in which data is accessed and consumed need to be open and intuitive. A successful system must also handle all data types, including high-performance native NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols, as well as handling small files, metadata, and large objects.
Adaptability: Will your solutions evolve to meet your ever-changing needs? Hardware is constantly being improved and to deliver exponential advantages. The same can be true for software. It’s important that your infrastructure is resilient enough to keep pace with ever-evolving and expanding trading needs and capabilities. Equally important is the ability to leverage AIOps/MLOps to achieve a flat, nimble workflow so teams can iterate quickly and fail fast via a CI/CD pipeline across any cloud and any infrastructure.
Reliability: Is your data infrastructure reliable in all cases, including during upgrades? Trading opportunities can be fleeting, placing a premium on solutions that deliver the highest level of reliability and resilience, including during software and/or hardware upgrades that are executed in real time. Too often, legacy infrastructure is ill-suited to the “always on” demands of quant trading.

Affordability: Are you looking at the big picture when you consider the cost-effectiveness of your solutions? It pays to go beyond initial costs and consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) over a multi-year time horizon. Piecemeal or incomplete solutions can appear attractive in isolation but then fail to deliver when combined to make a complete ecosystem. TCO may be kept in check by a solution that can scale up and down quickly, on a pay-as-you-go basis, as strategies are deployed or abandoned.
Sustainability: What is the environmental impact of the different technology solutions that your business requires to thrive? Sustainability is certain to be a big part of any technology conversation. Embrace ecologically effective options that fit your requirements.

Achieve Success in Quantitative Trading with Pure Storage®

The world of quant trading is a demanding one. High performance is table stakes and speed for everything from analysis to backtesting to execution is essential. Challenges and opportunities emerge and evolve at a sustained and unpredictable pace. This makes a flexible approach that combines the best of technology with a full set of features and options from a trusted partner key to success. Only by embracing a “best in breed” mentality can quants make sure they have what they need both now and in the future.

For over a decade, Pure Storage has led the field in developing and deploying all-flash solutions that deliver the very best in unified storage solutions. Our “likability” shines through in our industry-leading net promoter score (NPS) from our customers. And our raw “ability” is validated by Meta’s selection of Pure Storage as storage partner for their AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.

No matter your needs for quant trading, Pure Storage offers the most performant, flexible, and cost-effective solutions. Read our Quantitative Trading white paper to learn how Pure Storage’s all-flash storage solutions provide unmatched speed, scalability, and simplicity. And meet with an expert to find out how Pure Storage enterprise-class data solutions can accelerate your quant trading.