Been thinking about an interesting tension in this community.
The amount of genuine research that gets posted here is impressive. Real backtests, honest post mortems, Monte Carlo outputs, regime analysis. People clearly put serious work in.
But sharing a result is very different from sharing the strategy itself. Most of the serious work seems to stay private, which makes sense. Alpha decays when it is crowded and there is no obvious upside to making your edge public.
What I am curious about is the cases where someone actually did try to share or publish a strategy externally. Not on Reddit, on an actual platform or even informally to a group of traders.
If you have done this I would genuinely like to understand:
What made you decide to share it in the first place? Where did you share it and what was the experience like? Did sharing it actually affect the strategy's performance? Would you do it again?
And if you considered it but decided against it, what stopped you? Was it the IP concern, the crowding risk, the effort involved or something else entirely?
Also curious about the economics. The few platforms that exist for this (Collective2 etc.) take 30 to 50% of subscription fees. Is that a reasonable model or does it feel extractive given that the quant is the one with the actual edge?
Happy to share what I am building in this space once there is more to show but genuinely asking first because I would rather build the right thing than a polished version of the wrong thing.