🖥️WorldQuant IQC

I competed in the WorldQuant International Quant Competition (IQC) from April to July of 2025. I worked with You-Ruei, Terence, and Patricia, three undergraduates reading my thesis. As this competition happened right after Prosperity 3, I felt fresh from the momentum of competition and was ready to continue the work. Additionally, as my team members were all my undergraduate mentees, there was an expanded leadership component in managing a team of four now.

The competition narrowed sharply in each stage. At the end of Stage 1, 20% of teams globally qualify to advance. Stage 2 concludes in finals, consisting of the top 8 teams per country/region. The winner from each Stage 2 final advances to Stage 3.

In Stage 1, we placed 4701 out of 76884.

One unique facet of this competition format is that IQC uses WorldQuant's proprietary Fast Expression language, on their BRAIN platform. This meant that a component of the competition was also learning the syntax of a new language. It was the first time I had to learn a new language while in the middle of having to accomplish something with it.

I found the format of the competition to be a bit hectic. Rather than the structured rounds and uniform areas of focus like Prosperity had, IQC was more of a free-for-all. Submit as many strategies ("alphas", as called by WorldQuant) as your team can, and the merged performance of all team submissions count as your score, which determines your rank. Each individual strategy cannot have a correlation greater than 0.7 with another submitted by your team, which I suppose prevents blindly submitting them in bulk.

Along the way, our IQC submissions counted towards the WorldQuant Research Consultant program. WorldQuant compensates consultants proportionate to the performance of their submitted strategies. Admittedly, at the level our strategies were performing it funded a coffee or two, but for undergraduates or early graduate students I think this is a great way to have an initial relevant experience to mention when constructing a resume.