Quant House Fills Out Line-up With SmartQuant Buy

French low-latency data provider Quant House has acquired the technology assets and client base of SmartQuant, a vendor of automated trading development tools based in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Quant House has now taken on SmartQuant's 60 buy-side clients and an undisclosed number of its 25 London-, Paris- and St. Petersburg-based staff, and has re-branded its technology as QuantFactory.

The QuantFactory tools are based on the Microsoft .Net framework and allow users to develop, back-test, simulate and execute program trading strategies, officials say. In a statement, Quant House chief executive Pierre-François Filet says that the acquisition is part of the company's vision to build a "complete end-to-end program trading solution."

According to Stéphane Leroy, head of global sales and marketing at Quant House, the vendor now offers all the components necessary for automated trading—market data, trading strategy development tools, an execution engine and proximity hosting.

The vendor's product suite includes QuantDeveloper, a development environment for developing, testing, debugging and optimizing trading strategies; QuantEngine, an execution engine that allows users to deploy strategies as black box applications; and QuantDatacenter, data capture technology for use in QuantDeveloper.

"Any client using QuantFactory can use Quant House ultra-low-latency market data easily. It is a native integration as the Quant House market data adapter is already developed and up and running," says Leroy. A suite of market data adapters also allow clients to integrate any other data source, he adds.

Quant House currently supports 80 clients, including hedge funds, asset managers and proprietary trading desks. Only a few are currently using both QuantFactory and Quant House products, though Leroy believes there are strong synergies between the two product sets as both are "oriented to high-frequency trading."