QuantAscent — Product Overview¶

What Is QuantAscent?¶

QuantAscent is a desktop application that gives individual investors the kind of analytical tools professionals use — without writing a single line of code.

Build investment strategies from real financial data. Backtest them against 13 years of history. When you're confident, add them to your Strategy Manager and run rebalances through your own Interactive Brokers account — every rebalance previewed and approved by you before any order is sent. Track every position, every trade, and every dollar of performance — all from one application.

You don't need a broker connection to get started — the Library, Static Builder, Adaptive Builder, Backtester, Company Analysis, and Company Screener all work standalone on the included financial database. Connect IBKR when you're ready to run a strategy with real or paper money.

Whether you're screening for undervalued stocks, building a multi-factor scoring model, or just want a clearer picture of what you own and why, QuantAscent puts you in control.

Who Is It For?¶

QuantAscent is built for self-directed investors who want to make more informed decisions about their money. You don't need a finance degree or programming skills — just curiosity about what drives stock returns and a desire to be more systematic about investing.

Active individual investors who want to go beyond gut feelings and stock tips
Quantitatively curious people who want to explore which metrics have historically lined up with returns
DIY portfolio managers who want detailed tracking and automation without paying for a professional data terminal

Core Features¶

Research & Discovery¶

Explore What Has Historically Worked

QuantAscent includes a research engine with 150+ financial metrics computed for 5,000+ US stocks — spanning value, quality, growth, momentum, and safety. A recent update added 17 new metrics across price/risk and earnings-quality factors, plus earnings-timing signals — Days Since Earnings and Days Since Filing — drawn from official company filings going back to 2004. Rather than guessing which metrics matter, you can test them:

IC Rankings — See which financial metrics have historically lined up with subsequent stock returns, ranked by the strength of that historical relationship
Quintile Analysis — Split the stock universe into five groups by any metric and compare their performance. Does buying "cheap" stocks actually work? Now you can see for yourself.
Threshold Scanning — Sweep cutoff values for any metric to find where the historical sweet spot was (e.g., "Below what P/E ratio have stocks historically outperformed?")

Company Screener

Filter the entire universe in real time across 150+ financial metrics. Set conditions like "ROE > 15% AND Debt-to-Equity < 1.0 AND Market Cap > $1B" and instantly see which companies pass. Click any result to dive deeper.

Company Deep-Dives

Select any ticker for a full fundamental breakdown:

16 key metrics at a glance (valuation, profitability, financial health)
8 interactive trend charts: price history with moving averages, revenue & earnings, profit margins, cash flow, profitability, balance sheet health, valuation multiples, and per-share metrics
Upcoming earnings dates (news headlines coming soon)

Strategy Building & Backtesting¶

Build Strategies Visually

Create investment strategies by adding scoring criteria as visual cards — no coding required. Each criterion defines a financial metric, a threshold, and a point value. Stocks that score above your minimum threshold qualify for your portfolio.

For example, you might build a strategy that awards points for:

High free cash flow yield (value)
Improving return on invested capital (quality)
Strong recent price momentum (momentum)
Low debt-to-equity ratio (safety)

Add filters for market cap range, sector, industry, or country. Set how many stocks to hold and how often to rebalance. Then backtest it.

Backtest Against Real History

Run your strategy against up to 13 years of real financial data. QuantAscent computes 20+ performance metrics so you can see exactly how your strategy would have performed:

Return Metrics	Risk Metrics	Risk-Adjusted	Portfolio Stats
CAGR	Max Drawdown	Sharpe Ratio	Win Rate
Total Return	Annualized Volatility	Sortino Ratio	Avg Stocks Held
vs. S&P 500	Alpha & Beta	Calmar Ratio	Best / Worst Period

Results include a portfolio growth chart benchmarked against the S&P 500. Every backtest is automatically saved so you can revisit and compare previous runs without re-computing.

Design Your Own Process (Adaptive Strategy Builder)

The Adaptive Strategy Builder flips the roles: you author a strategy as a process — the universe it draws from, a factor structure with fill rules you choose, and bounded selection dials — and the software runs it walk-forward, re-deriving the picks at every quarter exactly as it would in live use. The most recent ~2 years stay sealed until you lock the process; every candidate reports how it compares against 500 random portfolios from its own universe, and "none beat the benchmark" is an honest, normal outcome. A locked process can be adopted and then re-derives its rules at every rebalance — a changed derivation waits as a proposal for you to accept or decline, and rebalances always trade the accepted rules — with every trade list shown for your approval.

A Library of ETF Trackers

For the hands-off half of a portfolio, the Library's ETFs tab offers single-ETF trackers for major indexes (S&P 500, NASDAQ-100, Russell 2000), sectors, bonds, commodities, and international markets — each with a cached full-history backtest. Add one as its own sleeve or fold it into a fixed-allocation strategy at the portfolio share you choose.

Portfolio Management¶

Dashboard

Your portfolio at a glance: current value, daily P&L, risk metrics (Sharpe, Sortino, max drawdown, volatility), and a performance chart with S&P 500 overlay. A monthly returns heatmap shows your performance calendar — green months and red months, side by side with the benchmark. Returns are tracked two ways: Time-Weighted Return (TWR) measures strategy performance, while Money-Weighted Return (MWR/IRR) measures your actual investor return accounting for the timing of deposits and withdrawals.

Holdings

Every open position with real-time prices from Interactive Brokers: shares owned, cost basis, market value, daily change, unrealized P&L, and percent of portfolio. Place buy and sell orders directly from this view.

Trade History

A complete record of every trade, organized in a tree view by strategy and symbol. See realized P&L broken down by short-term and long-term gains, with FIFO lot matching for accurate cost basis tracking.

Strategy Performance

Track each strategy's contribution independently. Compare your strategies against benchmarks (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Russell 2000, Dow Jones) across configurable date ranges. See which strategies are pulling their weight.

Benchmark Tracking

Daily rolling returns across multiple windows (1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years) plus cumulative MTD, QTD, and YTD — for both your portfolio and four major benchmarks.

Trading & Execution¶

Strategy Execution

Strategies you build and backtest can be added to your Strategy Manager and traded through Interactive Brokers. Adding one shows the strategy's full rule set for your review before you confirm. The execution engine handles the full rebalance cycle:

Exit positions that no longer qualify under your strategy's criteria
Trim positions that are overweight
Enter new positions that now meet your scoring threshold
Preview proposed trades before committing — see exactly what will be bought and sold

Smart Order Handling

Runs in the background — orders and rebalances work in a minimizable status window so the app stays fully usable, with each order's status and actual fill price shown live. Rebalancing is a single step: kick it off and keep working.
Orders are priced at the live market when placed (lifting the ask for buys, hitting the bid for sells) for reliable fills, with buys re-sized to the cash your sells actually freed
Unfilled orders keep working until your chosen deadline — a fixed timeout, or until the end of the trading day (GTD)
Multi-strategy rebalances run one strategy at a time (net-sellers first) so each strategy's cost-basis attribution stays clean
Automatic safety: if a strategy's sell orders are rejected by the broker, that strategy's buys are not placed
Every rebalance shows a preview of the planned orders for your confirmation before anything is placed — and paper (fake-money) portfolios let you exercise the whole flow without real dollars

Strategy Scheduling

Give each strategy its own rebalance cadence — daily, weekly, every 4 weeks, or every 12 weeks. The schedule drives reminders: the "Next rebalance" label on each strategy card, the Upcoming Schedule panel, and missed-rebalance catch-up prompts. Nothing trades from it by itself. The background scheduler handles the data side automatically — downloading activity statements from IBKR, reconciling trades, and updating benchmarks each morning.

Trade Scheduler

Schedule a single strategy rebalance to fire once at a future market time you pick — later today or on the next trading day (holiday-aware). You review and authorize the names and sides in advance; when it runs, sells go as shown (clamped to what you hold) and each buy is re-sized at the live price and capped to your budget. QuantAscent never picks different names on its own. This is the only way trades run unattended, and each one requires your explicit approval.

Margin Support

Optional margin trading with a configurable leverage cap (up to 4x). Position sizing automatically respects your margin limits. Because IBKR liquidates positions rather than issuing margin calls, Holdings shows a live estimate of how far your positions can fall before that happens, a warning strip appears across the app while that cushion is thin, every rebalance preview shows the cushion before and after the plan, and a broker-forced sale is labelled in Trades and pauses scheduled rebalances until you acknowledge it.

Accounting & Tax¶

Trade Reconciliation

QuantAscent automatically downloads IBKR FLEX activity statements and reconciles them against your local trade log. Open positions, closed lots, and realized P&L are cross-validated daily.

Tax-Ready Reporting

Wash sale detection and tracking with holding period adjustments
Realized gains broken down by short-term and long-term
Tax schedules formatted for your CPA
Lot-by-lot detail with FIFO cost basis

Strategy Manager¶

Manage all your strategies from a central hub. See your allocation across strategies at a glance, toggle strategies active or inactive, configure rebalance schedules, and monitor execution status. QuantAscent supports multiple strategy types running simultaneously:

Equity Scoring — Multi-factor scoring models that dynamically select stocks based on your criteria
Fixed Allocation — Maintain target weights in specific ETFs or stocks with tolerance-based rebalancing
Discretionary — A permanent sleeve that automatically tracks trades you make directly in your brokerage account outside of QuantAscent, so nothing shows up as "Unknown"

Rename, Archive & Protect History

Rename a strategy at any time. When a strategy has run its course, archive it instead of deleting — archiving keeps its full lifetime history, which you can revisit at any time. To protect your records, strategies and portfolios that have ever traded are archived rather than deleted.

Account Safety

Bind a portfolio to a specific Interactive Brokers account so trades can only route there. If you're connected to the wrong account — or have a live account paired with a paper portfolio (or vice versa) — QuantAscent warns you before anything is placed.

Global Excluded Tickers

Maintain one cross-portfolio list of symbols your broker can't trade. Excluded tickers are skipped everywhere, so a strategy never tries to buy something that can't be filled.

Getting Started¶

First launch starts with a quick sign-in — email and password, or Continue with Google — followed by a short one-time disclosure to read and accept. Then a startup wizard prepares your data automatically:

Database Sync — Download the financial data library (5,000+ companies, 13 years of data)
Data Pack — Install the ETF trackers with their cached backtests, plus the freshest daily data
Metrics Matrix — Build the analysis matrix from your local data
Data Catchup — Backfill any missing portfolio, trade, and benchmark data

You then land in Demo Mode — a hidden sample portfolio with three years of simulated daily activity that fills every execution view, so you can explore the Dashboard, Strategy Performance, Holdings, Account, and Trade Log immediately without an IBKR setup. Every affected page shows a persistent yellow banner reminding you these are sample numbers, and a short guided tour points out the app's main areas (replay it anytime from Settings > Account).

While in Demo Mode, all the research-side tools (Library, Static Builder, Adaptive Builder, Backtester, Company Analysis, Company Screener) are fully live against the real financial database — only the broker-statement-driven views are showing demo data.

Connect a real account whenever you're ready — you can run the app indefinitely in Demo Mode. Click the yellow sample-data banner (or open Manage Portfolios from the sidebar and click Create Portfolio): you'll name the portfolio, choose its money type (real or paper), and enter your Interactive Brokers Flex credentials in the guided wizard. QuantAscent pulls your trading history immediately and replaces the sample data with your real portfolio. See the Setup Guide for detailed steps.

How It Works¶

QuantAscent runs on your computer. Your financial data, trade history, and strategy configurations are stored locally. What leaves your machine: market-data and order calls through your own brokerage connection, your QuantAscent sign-in and subscription check (a signed sign-in token, no portfolio data), app and data-pack updates, and a bug report only if you choose to send one. A bug report carries your description, basic system info, and the recent app log with account IDs, sign-in e-mail and balances masked before upload; the dialog shows you the masked log before anything is sent, and the report is deleted from our server 90 days after you send it.

The application connects to two data sources:

Your Interactive Brokers account — for real-time prices, trade execution, and activity statements
QuantAscent data library — a periodically updated database of financial fundamentals, ratios, and computed metrics for the US equity universe (downloaded once and updated automatically)

Automatic Updates¶

QuantAscent checks for updates each time you launch the app — before sign-in, so updates never require an account. On both Windows and macOS, updates download and install silently in the background — the app restarts automatically with the new version, no manual downloads or reinstalls needed. You can also check for updates manually from Settings > Data > Software Updates.

System Requirements¶

Windows 10 or later, or macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later
RAM Required: 12 GB. 16+ GB is recommended
Storage: 20 GB Required
Interactive Brokers account (only required to connect live or paper money — research, backtesting, and screening all work without one)
IBKR Pro specifically, if you want live prices, holdings reconciliation, or trading from the app — IBKR Lite does not include API access. A Lite account still works for portfolio tracking and reporting through the Flex Web Service. IBKR Pro bills market data separately — budget $1.00/month for the Cboe One (NP,L1) subscription QuantAscent needs for live prices and limit-order pricing. That is the Non-Professional rate; trading through a business entity or as a registered adviser requires Professional status, which costs considerably more.
Internet connection for market data and trade execution

Documentation¶

Setup Guide — Install, connect IBKR, configure the Flex query, and walk through first launch
Screen Guide — Detailed reference for every tab and dialog in the app
Research Analysis — Methodology behind the quant engine: IC analysis, quintile breakdowns, backtesting, and metric definitions
FAQ — Answers to common questions
Glossary — Plain-language definitions of financial and quantitative terms
Release Notes — What changed in each version