Crowd-sourced fintech platform Quantopian announced it’s ended operations. Inconsistent performance has proved to be a theme across such investing platforms — in January, competitor WorldQuant laid off 130 employees and closed five of its offices.
Quantopian’s co-founders announced that they would join Robinhood’s product and engineering teams along with the majority of headcount. It was unclear whether Robinhood has purchased the platform or any further terms of the arrangement.
Robinhood has had controversy over its retail-oriented operations. But recent academic research showed that Robinhood investors acted as a (small) market-stabilizing force during the March 2020 Covid crisis, and the collective crowd portfolio did not underperform with respect to standard academic benchmark models.