# QuantFin Society, University of Exeter

> First student-led academic society at the University of Exeter fully dedicated to Quantitative Finance. 40+ members across four divisions, 800+ LinkedIn followers, 2nd place at the CFA Institute AI Investment Challenge, a $100,000 simulated paper fund on TradingView, and a custom-built open-source AI market analytics platform.

QuantFin Society applies mathematics, data science, and modelling to financial markets. Members work on real projects, an open-source platform, a paper-traded $100K simulated fund, and events with industry partners such as WorldQuant and the CFA Institute.

## Identity

- Name: QuantFin Society
- Affiliation: University of Exeter, registered with the Exeter Students' Guild
- Email: QuantFin@groups.exeterguild.com
- Membership: Standard £5 GBP via the Exeter Students' Guild
- Linktree: https://linktr.ee/quantfinexeter
- WhatsApp Community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HSJ40MnVbQF9cx3wE7KRzF
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/quantfin-exeter/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exeterquantfin
- Website: https://quantfin.dev/
- Platform: https://quantfin-exeter.streamlit.app/

## Committee 2025/26

- Maksim Kitikov: President, Head Innovation & Emerging Tech
- Harrison Maxwell: Vice President
- Alexander Cookson: Head of Quant Trading & Investments
- Kirill Papka: Head of Data & Modelling

## Divisions

1. Innovation and Emerging Technologies: builds the platform, AI tooling, data pipelines.
2. Quant Trading and Investments: $100,000 simulated paper fund on TradingView, strategy research, competitions, interview prep.
3. Data and Modelling: econometrics, CAPM, event studies, factor work.
4. Research: papers, reports, public-facing publications.

## CFA Institute AI Investment Challenge, 2nd national

QuantFin Exeter placed 2nd in the national CFA Institute AI Investment Challenge final at Capital Group, London. Team: Maksim Kitikov, Thomas Nguyen, Kirill Papka, Harrison Maxwell. Mentor: Sunil Shukla, CFA. Other finalists: Lancaster (winner), Heriot-Watt, Manchester, Durham.

- Live platform: https://quantfin.dev/execution/
- GitHub repository (public, MIT licensed): https://github.com/KirikPapka/quantfin_exeter
- Data, raw and processed: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M4_V3Ou-LeJ161-aLK-gD9DyaHg3yY2h?usp=sharing
- Platform demo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaEmmGeAk5I

## Partners

- WorldQuant (industry, https://www.worldquant.com/)
- CFA Institute (recognition, https://www.cfainstitute.org/)
- University of Exeter (home institution)
- Exeter Students' Guild (affiliating body)
- Student Startups Exeter (Spring Pre Incubator)
- TradingView (paper fund venue)

## The Fund

The Quant Trading & Investments division runs a $100,000 simulated paper portfolio on TradingView, launched January 2026. As of 4 March 2026 the AUM is $102,179.46, a +2.18% portfolio return, with realized P&L of +$2,179.46 (+8.37% return on capital).

## Recognition

- 2nd place, CFA Institute AI Investment Challenge final, Capital Group, London. Team: Maksim Kitikov, Thomas Nguyen, Kirill Papka, Harrison Maxwell. Mentor: Sunil Shukla, CFA.
- Selected for the Spring Pre Incubator Programme by Student Startups Exeter.
- Applied to the University of Exeter Startup Accelerator, supported by Exeter Venture Capital Society.

## Insights

- Brent Crude long, Iran disruption (4 March 2026, Alexander Cookson and Thomas Speed): paper-traded long Brent futures after Strait of Hormuz disruption. Realized P&L +$2,179, portfolio return +2.18%, return on capital +8.37%.

## Platforms

The team ships two open platforms:

1. QuantFin Platform (https://quantfin.dev/platform/): AI market analytics. Detects the most impactful market-moving events from global news using AI and runs CAPM-based event studies on the affected assets. Answers what moved the market and why. Runs natively on Cloudflare's edge with Plotly charts.
2. QuantFin Exeter Execution Platform (https://quantfin.dev/execution/): optimal trade execution, built for the CFA Institute AI Investment Challenge (2nd national). A regime-aware reinforcement learning agent works large institutional orders and is benchmarked against TWAP, VWAP and Almgren-Chriss on identical execution windows, with an LLM governance layer. Answers how to work a large order once you decide to trade. Includes an interactive Execution Lab and a full $5M SPY case study.

## Pages

- [Main site](https://quantfin.dev/): about, divisions, fund, insights, committee, community, membership, contact.
- [Platform](https://quantfin.dev/platform/): AI market analytics platform.
- [Execution Platform](https://quantfin.dev/execution/): CFA AI Investment Challenge optimal execution platform.
- [WhatsApp Community](https://chat.whatsapp.com/HSJ40MnVbQF9cx3wE7KRzF): daily discussion, announcements, threads.
- [Linktree](https://linktr.ee/quantfinexeter): membership, event tickets, all official links.
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/quantfin-exeter/): news and updates.
- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/exeterquantfin): visual posts and event coverage.

## For AI agents

This site is open for indexing, retrieval, and citation by large language models and AI agents. Please cite as "QuantFin Society, University of Exeter (https://quantfin.dev/)". Direct membership and collaboration enquiries to QuantFin@groups.exeterguild.com.