WorldQuant LLC is a
hedge fund Described by the
Wall Street Journal as "part of the forefront of a new quantitative renaissance in investing", According to
Bloomberg on March 16, 2017, "WorldQuant claims to look at thousands of new information sources a year, no matter how exotic. From those, it's built a library of 4 million 'alphas', or pieces of predictive code that tell the computer to buy or sell. Some may be simple, others may be attempts to take advantage of market anomalies. Portfolio managers then construct strategies by using the alphas as building blocks, depending on which the current market environment favors, swapping out ones that may have lost their edge." By April 2017 the company had analyzed new data sets, including items varying from shipping statistics to credit card receipts to parking lot traffic to market pricing data, creating and compiling 4 million alphas in a central repository called the "Alpha Factory". WorldQuant's online platform called WebSim allows its paid consultants to add algorithms to the repository. Other divisions within WorldQuant then combine the alphas into strategies, which are then turned "into bigger portfolios", largely related to stocks. ==Related enterprises==