Gator Quant Hacks is a national quantitative finance competition hosted by QuantED and the AlgoGators Investment Fund at the University of Florida. From October 2 to 4, 2026, students from universities across the country will spend 48 hours doing the work quants actually do: forming a hypothesis, testing it against real market data, and defending the result in front of people who do this for a living.
The event runs in a hybrid format. In-person teams compete in the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom in Gainesville, Florida, and virtual teams compete remotely on equal footing, with the same tracks, the same deadlines, and the same judging.
You do not need a finance background. One of our three tracks requires no dataset and no prior markets knowledge at all. If you can write code or reason through a hard math problem, there is a place for you here.
Who should compete- Students curious about quant research, trading, or systematic investing, with no prior experience needed
- CS, math, statistics, physics, and engineering students who like hard problems
- Finance and economics students who want to test ideas with data instead of slides
- Anyone who has read about quant finance and wanted a real reason to try it
Open to currently enrolled students at any U.S. university, undergraduate and graduate.
TracksTrack 01: Research and Alpha Discovery Pick a question about markets and answer it properly. Teams form a hypothesis, test it against data, and submit a written analysis alongside a live presentation to judges. Judged on the quality of the question, the rigor of the testing, honesty about what the data does and does not support, and clarity of communication. Best fit for finance, economics, and statistics students.
Track 02: Quantitative Puzzles and Brainteasers A continuous point ladder running the full 48 hours. Problems in probability, combinatorics, expected value, market making, and algorithmic reasoning unlock progressively, and teams climb the leaderboard by solving them. No dataset, no setup, no finance background required. Jump in at hour one or hour thirty. Best fit for CS and math students, and the easiest way to try quant for the first time.
Track 03: Systematic Trading Build a trading strategy and backtest it on historical data provided by our data partners. Submissions are evaluated on risk-adjusted performance, including Sharpe ratio, maximum drawdown, and turnover, rather than raw return. Overfitting is the thing to beat here, and the judges will look for it. Best fit for anyone who wants to know whether their idea survives contact with out-of-sample data.
Teams may enter one track. Pick the one that fits how you think.
Registration and event details: gqhacks.com Join the participant Discord: https://discord.gg/PhEnUQXCp
Requirements
All submissions are due on Devpost by 10:00 AM Eastern on Sunday, October 4, 2026. Late submissions will not be judged. Submit early and edit up to the deadline, since Devpost will not accept anything after it closes.
Required for every submission, all tracks- Project title and summary. A short description of what you built or found, written so a judge can understand it in thirty seconds.
- Track selection. State your track (01, 02, or 03) in the first line of your description. One track per team.
- Code repository. A public GitHub link, or a private repo shared with the organizer account listed on the Resources tab. All code you wrote during the event must be included.
- Demo video. Maximum 3 minutes, uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo with embedding enabled and public or unlisted visibility. Walk through your approach and your result. Slides on screen are fine, and production value is not judged.
- Team roster. All members added to the Devpost submission. Anyone not listed is not eligible for prizes.
Track 01: Research and Alpha Discovery
- A written analysis, PDF, maximum 8 pages, covering your hypothesis, data sources, methodology, results, and limitations
- A section that explicitly states what would falsify your finding
- A live presentation to judges, maximum 5 minutes plus questions, scheduled on Sunday
Track 02: Quantitative Puzzles and Brainteasers
- Solutions submitted through the puzzle platform as you solve them, which is what determines your ladder score
- A single Devpost submission at the end containing your working, code, or reasoning for the problems you solved
- Note: the leaderboard determines ranking, and the Devpost submission is used to verify your work
Track 03: Systematic Trading
- Full backtest code that runs end to end on the provided data
- A results file reporting Sharpe ratio, maximum drawdown, turnover, and cumulative return
- A one-page methodology note describing your signal, your position sizing, your assumptions about costs and slippage, and every step you took to avoid overfitting
- Any strategy that cannot be reproduced from your submitted code will not be scored
- Work started before the opening ceremony. Open source libraries, public datasets, and your own prior boilerplate are fine, and must be disclosed in your README.
- Data obtained outside the sources permitted for your track.
- Submissions from teams larger than [4] people.
Track 01 and Track 03 are judged on:
- Rigor: Is the methodology sound and are the results real?
- Insight: Is the question worth asking and is the answer non-obvious?
- Execution: Does the code work, and does it do what the writeup says?
- Communication: Can you explain it clearly to someone who did not build it?
Track 02 is scored by the leaderboard, with ties broken by earliest solve time.
Prizes
TBA
Devpost Achievements
Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:
Judges
Faculty and Sponsors
University of Florida
Quant
Jane Street
Quant
Citadel
SWE
Databento
Quant
Old Mission
Judging Criteria
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TBA
Questions? Email the hackathon manager
Invite others to compete
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