QubeAlgo Launches to Speed Up Trading App Development
Posted by Colin Lambert. Last updated: April 5, 2023
QubeAlgo has gone public with its customisable solutions that enable quants and developers to build bespoke, multi-asset, e-trading applications, often with minimal code – the service has been live with a select group of clients and is now being rolled out to the broader market.
The firm has been founded by Martin Zinkin and Jeff Leal, who have worked together and separately at a range of major banks in the FX, fixed income and crypto markets. Zinkin has led electronic trading businesses at Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Nomura, and Lehman Brothers, among others, while Leal headed quantitative electronic trading teams at BNY Mellon, Nomura, Lehman, and, most latterly, digital assets investment firm, Monochrome Asset Management.

“We’ve built similar solutions to Qube at our previous firms, this 5th generation, is even more powerful than its predecessors”
QubeAlgo’s asset-agnostic software (Qube) is designed, the firm says, to significantly speed up development of complex e-trading applications, making it much easier and more cost-effective to develop, test, and deploy sophisticated e-trading models and algorithms.
“We’ve built similar solutions to Qube at our previous firms, and now in its 5th generation, it is even more powerful than its predecessors,” explains Zinkin. “We’ve spent a lot of time over the years on low level technology, on build and deployment issues, data and environment, and cumbersome testing processes. We had a vision of a system that would allow quants and developers to be much more productive and allow them to focus instead on models and business logic.”
One of the challenges involved in building a business such as QubeAlgo is the myriad bespoke details required by an equally diverse number of potential clients – when it comes to client facing trading applications especially, one size rarely fits all. From a pure trading perspective also there are challenges emanating from the trading style of the institution and the type of flow it is managing.
This requires a high level of granularity and flexibility, meaning, naturally, the tech stack has to be equally bespoke. The founders of QubeAlgo say they have helped meet this challenge by combining

“Qube allows quants and developers to iterate rapidly and with high confidence”
both aspects of the buy vs build debate. Clients can completely own the code, freeing themselves from vendor release cycles and reducing internal development costs – they are also able to add proprietary functionality without leaking this to technology providers – thus leveraging their own IP.
The founders say Qube excels in environments where a small-to-medium team of quants or quant/developers are able to collaborate and produce fast and iterative enhancements to the e-trading stack, including smaller banks, quant funds, market makers, and asset managers looking for more automated solutions across both traditional and digital assets.
“Qube allows quants and developers to iterate rapidly and with high confidence – this is where the unique replay and back-testing framework comes into play,” explains Leal. “Qube helps reduce some of the uncertainties naturally introduced in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) of electronic trading builds. This is extremely powerful in providing assurances that the deployed applications will perform as expected.”