Q&A: Meet Taiwan’s Top of Quant Hackathon winner
Bloomberg’s nearly two dozen Top of Quant Hackathons have ignited a spark for innovative investment apps—and the Taiwan event was no exception. More than 10 teams participated in the hackathon, showcasing how financial service companies can use BQuant, Bloomberg’s suite of open-source based technology tools, and Bloomberg terminal data to solve the industry’s most pressing problems.
A trio from Gamma Paradigm won the Taiwan competition. The team built an application that uses Maximum Pain Theory to capture movements in the markets. The application, like all the entries, relied on BQuant to bring the data to life.
We recently caught up with the Gamma Paradigm team to learn more about their winning app, what they learned from the hackathon, and the benefits that BQuant brings to financial service companies.
Q: Can you describe the app you created as part of the Top of Quant Hackathon?
A: We developed an app called Option Force Crystal Ball, aimed at providing a quantitative solution for open interest analysis. It’s based on the Maximum Pain Theory (MPT) and uses machine learning techniques to capture the “pulses” of the market—movement of major market forces—with MPT Strength indicators.
Q: What was the appeal of the hackathon to your company?
A: Gamma Paradigm is a young company, and making decisions with the assistance of technologies has always been one of our strengths. To that end, we’re always interested in embracing new concepts and challenges. For us, attending the Bloomberg hackathon and trying out BQuant was a tremendous opportunity to challenge ourselves and gain new sights.
Q: How did you decide to participate in the event, and what resources did it require from your team?
A: Our team members come from different divisions of the company, which was the reason we were able to simultaneously develop the interface of our application and create our quantitative model. The hackathon lasted less than a month, so we came up with a solution during our non-working time, and regularly made sure that everyone was on the right track. We managed to finish our application before the designated deadline. That gave us the opportunity to spend more time on the details of our presentation, making sure we were as precise as possible within the 10-minute timeframe.
Q: What did you learn from the experience?
A: We learned more about what Bloomberg can offer for Quantitative Analysis, including the powerful BQuant, and the Bloomberg database. In addition, it was invaluable to compete with our peers as well as collaborate with professional mentors in the industry.
The overall experience of developing on BQuant was wonderful. BQuant offers lots of functions, and Bloomberg provided thorough assistance and guidance, making the process simple and straightforward. In addition, the comprehensive information on data integration provided by Bloomberg significantly shortened our development time.
Q: Did you make any changes at your company after the hackathon?
A: Since participating in the hackathon, we put more emphasis on data integration. The Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on markets and provides powerful services for further professional analytics and research. The combination helped us become more aware of the structure of our processes and the capabilities of the database.
Q: What are your thoughts on introducing technology to enhance asset management capabilities?
A: We think that introducing technology makes asset management more efficient. Technology not only improves the accessibility of various data, but also saves a lot of time on processing data. This allows companies to focus on researching asset management.
Take our company, Gamma Paradigm. We strive to leverage technology; it’s always been one of our important strengths. The convenience of BQuant is that we can implement vertical integrations, and find ways to make our asset management more efficient.
