Accelerator program Cohort dates to be announced

Quant Merger

The role AI just made possible: five quant functions, merged into one person.

A paid four week accelerator for becoming a Quant Merger: one person able to take a quantitative idea from hypothesis to research, code, validation, risk, execution and portfolio judgment, using AI to absorb mechanical work while keeping ownership of the decisions that matter.

The curriculum is revised several times a year as the role moves. Enrol once and you keep every future revision: your access does not expire, and neither does the material.

Apply to Join Bring this to your team
Length
4 weeks
Modules
Five stages
Prerequisites
Python, Statistics, Probability and Markets
Price
Announced soon
Join the Quant Merger Community

Enrolling gets you into the community, not just the course

First cohort applicants join at a founding discount and are added to the Quant Merger Community: access to the SQV3 Research Network and its recruitment reach, plus every future curriculum revision at no extra cost.

Founding cohort discount on price
Membership in the SQV3 Research Network
Reach into the recruitment network: desks, funds and protocols
Exclusive materials as the curriculum is built out
What a Quant Merger is

Five people used to pass one idea between them

01

Researcher

Formulates the question.

02

Analyst

Tests it against data.

03

Developer

Builds it into working code.

04

Trader

Executes it.

05

Strategist

Decides whether it fits the broader portfolio.

The merge

Every handoff between those people is a place where context gets lost. AI collapses the need for five separate people: it does not collapse the need for the judgment that used to travel between them.

A Quant Merger is the person who holds that judgment continuously, across the whole lifecycle, using AI to execute the mechanics underneath.

What it is not

It is not a quant who uses AI tools. It is a restructured way of thinking: a specific discipline about what to delegate, what to never delegate, and how to stay accountable for a model's real world behaviour rather than its backtest.

No handoffs, so no context lost between question and position.
One person accountable for the whole chain, so no weak assumption hides inside someone else's half of it.
The three gates

What to delegate, and what to never delegate

The framework at the centre of the program. Three tests a task has to pass before AI is allowed to own it.

I

Reversibility

If it goes wrong, can you undo it. Delegate freely where the cost of being wrong is a rerun, never where it is a filled order.

II

Time gated verifiability

Can you check the output in the time you actually have. Work you cannot verify before you need it is work you have not delegated: you have simply stopped looking.

III

Model ownership

Someone has to be able to defend every assumption in the model. That someone is you, whatever wrote the code.

Why the gates matter

This program teaches you how to think, not how to prompt

MIT Media Lab researchers gave the failure mode a name: cognitive debt. Measured with EEG, participants who wrote with an LLM showed the weakest neural connectivity of any group, recalled little of what they had produced, and reported a diminished sense of ownership over it. The effect persisted once the tool was taken away.

In quant work that debt has a price attached. A model you did not think through is a position you cannot defend. The three gates exist so the leverage compounds and the judgment does not atrophy.

Read the MIT study
How we work against it
You form the hypothesis before any tool is opened Every delegated output is verified against the gates You defend the model, line by line, as if you wrote it The reasoning stays yours: the labour is what moves
Program structure

One project. Four weeks. The full quant lifecycle.

Every participant carries one quantitative idea from hypothesis to research, code, validation, risk, execution logic and public proof of work. The program is not five disconnected subjects. It is one operating system for modern quant work.

01
Think

Research design, judgment and the Three Gates

How to formulate a question worth testing, distinguish economic intuition from statistical noise, and decide what AI may own. Reversibility, time gated verifiability and model ownership become the operating rules for every later stage.

Output: research specification
02
Research & build

Data, backtests, code and AI orchestration

Data acquisition, cleaning, exploratory analysis, feature construction, backtest architecture, testing AI generated code, reproducibility, lookahead bias, survivorship bias, transaction costs and execution assumptions. Agentic tools are used as infrastructure rather than as substitutes for understanding.

Output: working research pipeline and backtest
03
Judge

Quant judgment: try to kill your own strategy

Core discipline

Walk forward analysis, parameter sensitivity, regime dependence, bootstrap and Monte Carlo thinking, turnover, capacity, slippage, drawdowns, tail behaviour, factor exposure, position sizing and portfolio fit. The standard is not whether a backtest looks good. It is whether you can explain why the edge should exist and what would make you stop trusting it.

Output: investment or strategy memo
04
Operate

Execution, monitoring and crypto market structure

How strategies behave once they leave the notebook. Execution logic, monitoring, model drift, data drift, failure conditions and when to retrain or kill a strategy, together with the crypto plumbing a modern quant needs to understand.

AMMs

Constant product, concentrated liquidity and LP risk.

Derivatives

Perpetuals, funding, options, vaults and protocol mechanics.

Lending & yield

Rates, collateral, liquidations and decomposing yield into risk.

Output: deployable strategy with monitoring logic
05
Prove

Turn the work into proof

Live, first cohort only

Research communication, code and portfolio presentation, LinkedIn positioning and how to turn technical work into something recruiters, funds, desks and protocols can actually assess. The work remains the asset. Visibility makes it legible to the market.

Output: public research artifact and rebuilt positioning
The Quant Merger Community

Not an audience. A selected network of people who can actually do the work.

The Quant Merger Community is capped at 200 people. Entry is by application, not by follower count or first come first served access. Everyone fills in the application form and is reviewed before joining.

The goal is bigger than the accelerator itself: to build the SQV3 Research Network, a concentrated group of quants, researchers, traders, developers and technical operators whose work can be trusted, challenged, combined and eventually deployed across real research mandates.

The accelerator is one way into that network. Your research, code, judgment and contribution are what keep you relevant inside it.

Apply to Join
Network design
200
Maximum community size
Application reviewed before entry
Research first, networking second
Peer challenge and collaboration
Pathway into SQV3 research mandates
Long term SQV3 Research Network
Included with the program

The SQV3 Research Network

The community is the starting point for the SQV3 Research Network: a trusted layer connecting strong quantitative talent with the research problems, desks, funds and protocols that need it. It is not a job board. It is a working network built around demonstrated research quality and judgment.

Strong work can lead to collaboration, introductions, research mandates and relevant openings. The point is not simply to place people into jobs, but to create a research network SQV3 can draw on for real quantitative work.

Reach
Funds & trading desks DeFi & options protocols Market makers Research mandates & collaborators Relevant roles & introductions
Who it is for
Quants and quant traders

Adapting an existing workflow to AI without losing the rigour that made it work.

Analysts and researchers

Who want to operate across the full stack rather than one function of it.

TradFi professionals moving into crypto

Bringing the method with them and learning where the market breaks it.

Technical career changers

Moving into quant work from another quantitative field.

Aspiring complete quants

People who want to become complete quantitative thinkers rather than being trapped inside one quant function.

For teams

Build the capability in house

Also available as a private program for trading desks, funds and research teams: the same material, run against your own book, your own data and your own constraints, so the team leaves with one shared method instead of five private ones.

Scoped in conversation, not self serve.

Bring this to your team
Outcomes

What you leave with

The critical thinking a quant masters never teaches: how to interrogate a result, price your own uncertainty and know when a model is telling you nothing
A working end to end process: one idea carried from question to sized, costed position
Your own reusable research stack: pipeline, backtest and reporting, not course exercises
An agentic AI workflow arranged around research, analysis and execution
A portfolio of artifacts: strategies, backtests, research notes and code you can show
Crypto native competence across AMMs, derivatives protocols, lending and yields
A LinkedIn presence positioned for the role you want
Access to the SQV3 Research Network
A stronger position on compensation: broader scope, senior conversations, and the case for a higher band
The range to take on projects alone that used to need a team, whether employed or consulting

Join the first cohort

Apply to join the first cohort and the Quant Merger Community. Applications are reviewed, and the community is capped at 200 people.

Apply to Join Ask a question

As the first cohort, you join at a founding rate and get extra materials added as the curriculum is built out — a standing thank-you for enrolling before the track record does.