Quantopian was founded in 2011 to crowdsource market-beating investment strategies.
It shut down in 2020, and one of the lessons learned was “you can’t crowdsource alpha”.
" The demise of Quantopian’s investment fund was foreshadowed by Quantopian’s own researchers in a 2016 paper titled “All That Glitters is Not Gold.” The paper examined a large sample of backtests created by Quantopian users and found that backtest performance metrics offered “little value in predicting out of sample performance.” Quantopian spent the next several years trying unsuccessfully to work around this basic problem.
With thousands of users running backtests, some backtests will produce attractive results simply by chance. The best way to distinguish strategies with real edges from strategies that got lucky is to understand what market structure or behavioral bias the strategy is exploiting. You can’t do that with a black box strategy."