5,000 Backtested Strategies from 30 Years of Top Research

Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well.

Today I’m sharing some big news: Papers With Backtest now contains more than 5,000 backtested trading strategies, making it the largest open repository of its kind in the world. Every single strategy is grounded in a peer-reviewed or top-tier research paper published between 1990 and today, and every single one comes with Python code you can run, inspect, and build upon.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you’ve seen me share individual strategy deep dives — from trend following on stocks to optimal portfolio liquidation. What I want to explain today is the bigger picture: how we got here, why this collection matters, and how you can use it to accelerate your own research.

Let me start with some context on why this milestone is significant.

In the hedge fund world, building a backtested strategy from scratch is expensive. It starts with sourcing an idea — typically from a research paper, a market observation, or a proprietary signal. Then a quant translates the abstract trading rules into executable code, sources and cleans the necessary data, runs the backtest against historical prices, and analyzes the results. A single strategy can take days or weeks to implement properly. Multiply that by thousands, and you begin to see the scale of what quantitative firms invest just in the research phase.

What we’ve built at Papers With Backtest is infrastructure that normally costs millions of dollars in quant-team salaries — a structured, searchable library where every strategy is traceable to its source paper, implemented in standardized Python, and backtested against real market data. It’s the kind of resource that, until now, only existed behind the walls of well-funded institutions.