HONG KONG: Hedge fund WorldQuant announced that its premier quantitative competition drew a record number of participants this year, attributing the surge to the broader application of artificial intelligence, which has made it easier for university students to create quantitative trading models.
Last week, WorldQuant named four winners from a pool of 80,000 university entrants, a figure that doubled from the previous year and set a new record.
The growing prevalence of AI has lowered the barrier to entry, enabling students from diverse academic disciplines to develop trading algorithms. This has increased involvement in quantitative contests, which are rapidly evolving into crucial talent recruitment channels for some of the world’s largest hedge funds.
“Igor Tulchinsky, the founder and chairman of WorldQuant, which oversees more than $7 billion in assets, told Reuters. “I believe many participants are now utilizing AI and language models to assist them.”
Tulchinsky observed that this year, some teams successfully employed AI agents to read documents, assess ideas, and conduct simulations in a fully automated manner.
The International Quant Championship (IQC), organized by WorldQuant—one of the globe’s largest quantitative funds and an offshoot of Millennium Management—challenges participants to most effectively use mathematical models to forecast future price movements of diverse financial instruments.
According to WorldQuant, MinKyeom Kim from South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology secured first place. The other winners hail from India, Kenya, and Taiwan.
Data from With Intelligence indicates that quantitative hedge funds managing assets exceeding $1 billion saw their total assets grow by $44 billion in the first half of 2025, propelled by robust returns and investor inflows.
Tulchinsky, a Belarusian-born billionaire who leads the US hedge fund, stated that WorldQuant is concentrating on developing agentic systems—autonomous AI capable of independently analyzing markets and executing investment decisions.
The firm has set a target of deploying one million such AI agents within the next few years.
