Retail Quant Trading or Automated trading as we all know it, is the way of creating, testing and executing a trading strategy using a software trading platform to generate trade execution signals without any subsequent human intervention.
With the availability of computing capacity in the past five years, the data and the expanded bandwidth, capabilities that were available to institutional traders is now available in the retail space. With the changing nature of Wall Street firms, quant trading skills has also moved into the retail space. This has resulted in vast number of entrepreneurs creating great quant platforms for retail investors. These entrepreneurs have taken what was inside the four walls of institutions and once considered exclusive and made it available for the retail investors.
QuantConnect, BackTest.org, Quantpedia, Macroaxis, Equametrics, Quantopian are some of the firms that have launched these great retail platforms for average investors.
The platforms offer great back testing and analysis capabilities. This empowerment of retail investors is a great sign for the market. They are a great answer for traders who crave for sophistication, analysis and flexibility. Firms like Tradier offer free scalable brokerage Cloud API's to support platforms for data and trade execution too.
We are seeing a great converging effect. Retail traders are being offered sophisticated new platforms tools and broker integrations that will enable trading to be seamless.