📊 Quant Finance Research Hub

3,000+ quantitative finance papers from arXiv and SSRN, each distilled into a visual research flowchart, a math-complexity and empirical-rigor score, and a plain-language summary — so you can decide in 30 seconds whether a paper is worth your time.

Start with the flowchart library, read how we score papers, or search the full archive.

📬 The Quant Space Weekly

One email a week: the most interesting quant finance papers, scored and summarized. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

A Practical Quant Research Stack for a One-Person Shop (2026)

What you actually need to run serious quant research alone: a data layer you own, a database that fits your query patterns, a backtester you understand, and the discipline to keep it boring. Costs, trade-offs, and the mistakes everyone makes once.

September 6, 2026 Â· 6 min Â· thequant.space

Market Data for Quant Research: How to Choose a Vendor (2026)

Market data vendors don’t fail you on price — they fail you on survivorship bias, backfilled fundamentals, and licensing surprises. A decision framework and an honest map of the 2026 vendor landscape, from $30/month APIs to institutional feeds.

September 6, 2026 Â· 5 min Â· thequant.space

Quant Research Weekly — September 6, 2026

The 10 strongest of 14 new quant finance papers this week, ranked by empirical rigor and math complexity.

September 6, 2026 Â· 4 min Â· thequant.space

TimescaleDB vs ClickHouse vs DuckDB vs kdb+ for Tick Data Research (2026)

The tick-database decision is a workload decision: research scans, live ingestion, and as-of joins stress completely different engine properties. How DuckDB, ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, QuestDB, and kdb+ actually differ, and a default choice by team size.

September 6, 2026 Â· 5 min Â· thequant.space

An Entropic Factor Model for Robust Portfolio Replication

Portfolio replication, or the construction of a tradable basket of assets to match the risk-return profile of a target benchmark, is fundamentally an ill-posed inverse problem. When restricted to a subset of available assets, classical variance-minimizing models often yield unstable, over-leveraged

September 3, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Bayesian Confidence Recalibration and Research-Equilibrium Criticality: Temporal Support in Robust Portfolios

Robust portfolio rules that reconstruct confidence sets after learning need not preserve the evaluator obtained by prior-by-prior Bayesian transport. In the Gaussian model, this discrepancy is summarized by natural-coordinate displacement: inherited transport preserves it whereas fresh reconstructio

September 3, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Global Multi-Maturity SPX-VIX Calibration Beyond Markovian Stitching

We develop a global framework for joint S&P 500 (SPX)-VIX smile calibration across multiple maturities without the conditional-independence restriction induced by Markovian stitching. Exact local and global feasibility are equivalent: every globally feasible law has a block-preserving SPX-Markovizat

September 3, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Eliciting ESG Preferences for Reinforcement Learning-Based Portfolio Optimization

Modern portfolio management increasingly demands a balance between traditional risk-adjusted returns and strict Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) mandates. Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches typically optimize for a single ESG provider, neglecting the significant divergence in

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Insights on Time-consistent Deep Hedging under Elicitable Dynamic Risk Measures

We study deep hedging in the context of dynamics risk measures, where sequential decisions are time-consistent. Whereas the literature in such context mainly considers low-dimensional problems with simple environment dynamics, we tackle the high-dimensional problem of basket option hedging; we show

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Mean-field equilibrium of heterogeneous agents under market impact

Although market participants generally have access to a common information set, they make decisions based on forecasts formed over heterogeneous horizons. Because market impact depends on aggregate positions rather than trader identities, these decisions feed back into prices through their collectiv

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Modeling Trade Durations under Temporal Granularity Effects in Forex Markets

Trade durations in high-frequency foreign exchange data exhibit increased occurrence near integer values. To address this empirical phenomenon, we propose the granularity-adjusted autoregressive conditional duration (GA-ACD) model. It is based on a novel two-component mixture distribution consisting

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Price manipulation in nonlinear transient impact models: rigidity before memory and complete positivity after memory

Transient impact models compose a nonlinearity with a memory kernel, and the order of composition determines the criterion for absence of price manipulation. We classify both orders. If an arbitrary instantaneous law $f$ acts on the trading rate before any nonzero integrable Volterra kernel, nonnega

September 2, 2026 Â· 3 min Â· thequant.space

Scaling Laws, Tabular Data and Actuarial Ratemaking Models

Scaling laws in modern deep learning describe how held-out loss improves as model capacity, training data, and compute increase, often following power-law trends. We investigate whether analogous scaling regularities arise in actuarial ratemaking, where data are tabular, heterogeneous, and noisy, an

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Switching Frictions, Heterogeneous Trading Horizons, and Long-Memory Order Flow

This paper develops a mechanism through which costly changes in the representations used for portfolio choice can contribute to persistent signed order flow. Heterogeneous switching thresholds and opportunity volatility generate heterogeneous residence times, and renewal aggregation maps their execu

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Tempting the Agent: The Economics of Reputation without Persistent Identity in AI Agent Markets

Reputation is a fundamental mechanism through which markets sustain trust when service quality cannot be perfectly assessed ex ante, constituting a form of intertemporal economic capital by attracting future demand. Its effectiveness as a disciplinary mechanism depends not only on past interactions

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

The Analyst in the Prompt: Role, Retrieval, and Memory Biases in LLM Financial Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use user context such as memory, profiles, and role prompts to personalize their responses. This personalization can affect evidence-based judgment: the same evidence may lead to different conclusions under different user contexts. Finance provides a high-st

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Uniform Inference and Certified Capacity at a Reflexive Stability Boundary

This paper develops uniform inference and certified capacity decisions for an estimated financial stability boundary. Conditional risk, temporary cross-impact, and effective risk-bearing capacity are jointly estimated from dependent observations. Conventional pointwise inference is reliable at a sep

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Viscosity Supersolution Barriers to a Non-local Free Boundary Problem

We study a parabolic obstacle partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) with a dynamically moving bilateral free boundary. This type of problem arises in the mathematical modeling of speculative asset bubbles with Lévy jump processes. We consider the existence of viscosity supersolutions within t

September 2, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

Identification and Estimation of Staggered Difference-in-Differences with Network Spillovers

This paper develops a difference-in-differences framework for staggered policy adoption when units can be affected by other units’ adoption. For each treated cohort and event time, the framework separates the effect of own adoption, the spillover effect generated by other adopters, and the total eff

May 14, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space

The fine structure of electricity price volatility

We conduct the first rigorous study of electricity price volatility for the full panel of electricity prices across three European generation zones. By interpreting the observed day-ahead prices as local averages of a latent price process governed by a stochastic partial differential equation, we de

May 13, 2026 Â· 2 min Â· thequant.space