Bridging academic rigor and quantitative trading, for free

An independent research lab that tests strategies at scale and publishes every result in the open. Rigorous enough for academics, honest enough for practitioners.

Everything here is free and stays free. Every paper, model and dataset is open source and reproducible. Nothing to buy, no account needed.

Strategy-windows backtested
23M+
Working papers
6
Open-source models
13
SSRN paper downloads
6K+

Papers

Peer-facing research with full reproducibility packages. Six studies on the boundaries of statistical edge, tested at scale across asset classes.

LatestSSRN 6955879cross-market study

The Reach of the World Cup Distraction Effect

The whole planet watches the World Cup, yet the global markets that carry most of the trading barely flinch. Across 11 instruments, 5 market structures, 26 countries and 7 World Cups, 158 statistical tests turn up nothing that survives correction, and the headline effects that seem to travel are artifacts of how they are measured.

  • Scope: 11 instruments, 5 market structures, 26 countries, 7 World Cups
  • 158 statistical tests, 0 survive multiple-testing correction
  • A planet-scale attention shock the markets do not price
  • Effects that seem to 'travel' are measurement artifacts
Read the study

PaperSSRN 6636018

Does a popular statistical filter actually pick winners?

A simple question, tested at scale: does acting on a widely-used permutation test help you choose winning strategies ahead of time? The answer is no, and a famous result claiming it hurts turns out to be a rounding bug.

  • Scope: 437,911 strategies, 9 markets, 3 asset classes
  • Over 6 billion permutation tests run
  • The filter's edge: indistinguishable from zero
  • A well-known negative result traced to floating-point rounding
Read the study

PaperSSRN 6858778Published

Can you profit from the smallest coins after real costs?

Can you make money in coins that only trade on decentralized exchanges, once realistic trading costs are paid? We tested it across 27 chains, with demos you can poke at in the browser.

  • Scope: 27 chains, DEX-only coins
  • Long-only, with realistic costs applied
  • Any raw edge is eaten by the cost of trading
  • Explore it yourself with in-browser demos
Read the study

PaperSSRN 7022599Published

How much of a market maker's spread does adverse selection eat?

A market maker earns the spread and pays adverse selection to the traders who pick off its quotes. On futures data with the exchange's true buyer-or-seller tag on every trade, we measure both, fill by fill, and the spread is almost entirely consumed.

  • Scope: 13 CME futures, 353,387 maker fills
  • Captured spread and adverse drift, on the true sign
  • Net maker profit is statistically zero, a ceiling not a point
  • No inventory quote or order-flow signal we test beats it
Read the study

PaperSSRN 7157638Published

Is a lending protocol's “at-risk” number actually a loss?

A 5% de-peg flags $1.38B of one Aave-v3 slice as liquidation-eligible. On the same continuous price path the protocol books $0 of bad debt, and that is a property of the parameters rather than a lucky sample.

  • One live block: 17,419 borrowers, $6.5B of debt
  • Eligible debt, executed volume and realized loss separated
  • LT(1+b) < 1 in all eight live e-mode categories
  • Loss needs a broken path, not a deeper de-peg
Read the study

PaperSSRN 7461901Published

Does quoting at the best price pay on crypto exchanges?

A simulated market maker waiting at the back of the queue on Bybit, Binance and Hyperliquid earns less in spread than the price takes back within ten seconds of each fill. Because these exchanges tag every trade with its true aggressor side, the paper also measures what guessing that side costs.

  • Scope: 3 venues, 9,983 coin-days, 125.8M simulated fills
  • Net entry markout below zero on all three before fees
  • Lee–Ready and the tick rule keep the sign, not the size
  • One leg only: no exit, inventory or fee is measured
Read the study

Long-form articles

Interactive, figure-driven write-ups of the central empirical claims, each reproducible from a public data table.

break-even
pool loses, selection clears break-even

ArticleFlagship

Edge is in the Process

How we turned an unprofitable pile of half a million strategies into a portfolio that actually makes money, without touching the strategies themselves. The whole trick is which ones you choose to keep.

  • Scope: 533,638 strategies across 12 markets
  • Held all together: the pool loses money
  • Selected by past performance: profitable on 8 of 12
  • The edge is in the selection, not the strategy
Read the article
crowded corediversifying rim

ArticleInteractive

A topological way to build portfolios

882,000 thin-edge crypto strategies. Pick the ones at the rim of the correlation network, orthogonal to the common market mode, and the edge sharpens where chasing Sharpe blows up.

  • Scope: 882,000 strategies, 100 perpetual pairs
  • Select against the market mode, not by Sharpe
  • Profitable-portfolio fraction rises 28.7% to 45.1%
  • A volatility-regime overlay doubles the risk-adjusted return
Read the article
01|ρ|=0.5mean 0.123
pairwise |ρ|, peaked near zero

ArticleThe corpus

What “1.6 million strategies” actually means

‘1.6 million strategies’ sounds like data-mining. Here is why it is not, shown with the actual numbers behind the corpus.

  • Scope: 1.6 million strategies across 30 markets
  • The strategies are nearly independent of each other
  • Only ~3% are closely correlated
  • Every result is walk-forward, never in-sample
Read the article

Projects

Thirteen reference implementations of the lab's M-models, random matrix theory, Higher Criticism + knockoffs, topological data analysis, tail-EVT, each with an explainer, a live demo, and code.

Public output to date

6Working paperson SSRN: World Cup markets, permutation testing, DEX tradeability, maker adverse selection, Aave liquidation risk, crypto maker adverse selection
4Long-form articlesinteractive sims and figures, fully reproducible
13Open-source modelsPython · Rust · R
23M+Strategy-windows backtestedfull corpus, all 30 partitions
6K+SSRN paper downloadsacross six working papers
5+Years coding systematic strategiesPython · Rust · R · TypeScript

Open source

140,667lines of research code

across 20 public repositories on GitHub, plus the Research Review and Topology toolkit codebases (release pending), counted 2026-07-07

  • Python90.7% · 127,585
  • Rust8.3% · 11,737
  • R0.6% · 882
  • Shell0.3% · 463

Open by default, fork it, cite it, build on it.

Lines per project

Every public repository featured on this site, the paper reproducibility packages, the article companion code, the single-project repos, and the walk-forward backtesting framework, plus the self-contained toolkit core of the in-flight Topology program. Counts are source lines only.

  • Research-ReviewRelease pending28,753 lines

    The López-de-Prado Research Review program, per-study Python pipelines that reproduce and forward-test the methods from Advances in Financial Machine Learning, with evaluation, forward-value scoring and table generation. Opens at completion of the review.

  • topology-toolkitRelease pending19,210 lines

    The self-contained core of the Topology of Strategy-Space program, the importable Python package (I/O, strategy-space, topology, evaluation, the baseline-model zoo, clustering, the CLI apps, the figure theme). Open-sources at program completion; the program's ~43k further lines of experiment scaffolding, figure scripts and tests aren't counted here.

  • Reproducibility package for the DEX tradeability paper, the long-only AMM backtester with realistic per-fill costs, the bar-shuffled null control, the walk-forward evaluation and the cross-sectional learner, across 4,990 pairs on 27 chains.

  • quant-mm-simulator18,806 lines

    Reproducibility engine for the market-making adverse-selection paper, the event-driven maker-fill simulator, the true-sign markout decomposition, the cost model, and the significance toolkit, with correctness tests on bundled fixtures.

  • defi-param-stress10,881 lines

  • Monte-Carlo-paper10,000 lines

    Reproducibility package for the Monte-Carlo filter-evaluation paper, analysis scripts (Python / Rust / R), corrected aggregate tables, and a self-contained reproducer of the floating-point summation-order pitfall documented in the May 2026 revision.

  • Reproducibility package for the World Cup attention-markets paper, the event-study and null-control pipeline across 11 instruments and five market structures, with the per-nation cuts and the multiple-testing correction.

  • Reproducibility package for the crypto adverse-selection paper: the entry-markout decomposition, the reference fill rule, clustered inference with an abstention rule, the ten coin-day panels and a command-line tool that applies the decomposition and abstention rule to any book and tape carrying a true aggressor flag.

  • The walk-forward backtesting & robustness framework, the original Python build.

  • The Rust port of the backtesting framework, the production build.

  • Pre-registered study of parameter-surface stability, smooth ridges vs brittle spikes.

  • Empirical variance decomposition of in-sample → out-of-sample Sharpe degradation.

  • Geometry of strategy space, dimensionality and manifold structure.

  • Latent regime classification on market data, then regime-conditional strategy selection.

  • tail-evt403 lines

    Extreme-value analysis of cross-asset tail dependence, peaks-over-threshold with GPD fits.

  • Robust portfolio construction over a strategy universe.

  • Population-level statistics over a universe of algorithmic trading strategies.

  • strategy-rmt208 lines

    Random-matrix analysis of strategy correlation matrices, noise vs signal decomposition.

  • Reproducible synthetic demos behind the article “The signal is collective”.

  • hc-knockoffs184 lines

    Higher Criticism under dependence + Model-X knockoffs for FDR-controlled strategy selection.

  • strategy-tda181 lines

    Persistent homology of strategy space, topological data analysis on strategy populations.

  • Cross-asset correlation cube, pairwise correlations between asset return series.

Source lines only, READMEs, methodology notes, data files and configs aren't counted. 92,704 lines sit in the 20 public repos. Two further codebases open-source at program completion: the López-de-Prado Research Review pipelines (28,753 lines) and the Topology toolkit core (19,210 lines). The Topology program's ~43,000 further lines of experiment scaffolding, figure scripts and tests, and its Rust accelerator crates, are not counted here.

Daniel Gatto

  • Independent researcher
  • Economic Sciences candidate, UNIP
  • Quantitative Systems Consultant (NDA)
9+ yrs
In crypto marketssince 2017
6+ yrs
Quantitative researchsystematic methods
5+
Coding languagesPython · Rust · R · TS · C++
8k+
Following on X@DaruTrading
5K+
SSRN downloadsworking papers, to date

Daru Finance is the public output of one researcher. The work here is what gets done after-hours, in code, with receipts.

I write systematic-trading research with a strong reproducibility bias, Python for analysis, Rust for compute, R for verification. My current work focuses on the statistical structure of strategy populations: random-matrix bounds on correlation eigenspectra, Higher-Criticism + knockoffs for FDR-controlled selection, topological indicators for cluster stability, and extreme-value theory for tail co-movement. The throughline is that the unit of analysis is the population, not the individual strategy. From the research and the thirteen open-source models down to this site itself, design, code, charts, every word, it’s all a one-person build.

Read the full bio

Replications, corrections, methodological questions.

Academic correspondence is always welcome, replications, corrections, methodology questions.