About
Built around the work, not the pitch.
SSI Labs started with a student-built trading codebase and a problem: the work got better when other people challenged the assumptions, the code and the market logic.
The group exists to make that challenge regular. Bring the idea early, show the weak parts, and leave with a clearer test.
What it is
A student research and education group.
The club is for learning by doing: writing hypotheses, testing them on market data, and keeping enough detail for someone else to check the work.
- Real problems
- Live market data with fees, slippage, funding and the periods where a strategy stops working.
- Reproducible research
- A result is useful to the group when another member can rerun it and get the same numbers.
- Education
- Coursework applied to problems that do not give easy answers. Members show unfinished work and discuss what went wrong.
What SSI Labs is not
The club's limits.
No pooled money, paid signals or promised returns. Any future proprietary entity would be legally and operationally separate from the club.
- No pooled money.
- No outside investment through the club.
- No paid signals, subscriptions or strategy access.
- No promised returns.
- Any future proprietary entity would be legally and operationally separate from the club.
SSI Labs is an educational and research collective. It does not solicit or manage member capital, provide investment advice, sell trading signals or promise returns. Figures shown are preliminary research outputs, not an audited track record.
Weekly research session
Bring the unfinished version.
Each session is for work that still has questions. Someone brings code, results or a research idea; the room tests the assumptions and records what to do next.
01Bring work
A member brings an idea, a notebook, a result or a problem they cannot explain yet.
02Pull it apart
The group checks the data, costs, assumptions and the easiest ways the result could be fake.
03Choose tests
The next tests are agreed: new splits, stricter costs, different regimes or cleaner code.
04Come back
The work returns when the next version has something new to show.
04 Revise returns to 01 Present
Research standards
Before a result counts.
A result is only useful if someone else can see what produced it.
- 01
Returns are never shown alone. Risk, leverage, turnover, costs, exposure and volatility belong beside them.
- 02
In-sample and out-of-sample results are kept separate.
- 03
Parameter sweeps and tuning are disclosed.
- 04
Failures and weak points are recorded rather than hidden.
- 05
A project can be revised or stopped when its original hypothesis does not hold.
Markets
Start where the data and code already exist.
The first work is in crypto futures because the current codebase and data are there. Equities come next when the group has the data, tooling and review process to handle them properly.
Longer-term direction
The aim is a small research community that publishes work worth checking. SSI Labs is developing a pathway for recognition through Arc or another UNSW channel; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by UNSW, and makes no such claim until that process is complete.