Lucena Research

Jim from Business Owner and Private Investor

Lucena Research's software Quantdesk is a very expensive product at several thousand American Dollars per month. They offer a free trial but after trying it I would not use it even if it was free as there are many other free and lower price investment management software products available that do a much better job.

Quantdesk has a portfolio optimizer that seems to do only basic MVO. There are much more advance optimizers like Portfolio Visualizer which offers more robust options like implementing the Black-Litterman asset allocation model with much less cluttered interface

There is a forecaster which I was skeptical about from the beginning. I tested it out for a few equities and found as I suspected that their predictions are meaningless.

The third part of Quantdesk I used was the event analyzer which is a stock screener. It is OK but there are other options like Portfolio123 that have more parameters and a larger range of stocks for less than 10% of the price and like Quantdesk has a backtest for the screen.

The backtest looks nice but that does not justify the price. There are two other packages of Quantdesk which are the hedger and the replicator. I am not sure why the replicator would be of use in today’s world where there are hundreds of ETFs that track every index but it may be to a few. The hedger seems to work but it is easy to find stock correlations for free to use as a hedger.

Finally the site is glitchy and the actions often crash. In some of the backtests it looks like the prices are wrong as there are big jumps which do not correspond to reality. I did not investigate but it is probably that splits are not accounted for always. If it were free I may rate it 2 stars it is not worth anything. You would have to be absolutely mad to pay thousands for it per month.