SYNTHRA Glossary
This document provides concise definitions for essential WorldQuant BRAIN and SYNTHRA terms used throughout the codebase and documentation.
🌍 WorldQuant BRAIN Concepts
- Alpha: A mathematical expression or algorithm designed to predict price movements of assets and generate risk-adjusted returns.
- ACE (Alpha Calculation Engine): The official WorldQuant backtesting and simulation platform accessed via the API.
- Fast Expression: A single-line mathematical formula using platform-defined operators (e.g.,
ts_mean,rank) to represent alpha logic. - Python Alpha: An alpha strategy implemented as a multi-line Python function conforming to the official template, allowing custom logic and pandas operations.
- Sharpe Ratio: A metric representing the risk-adjusted return of an alpha, calculated as average return divided by volatility.
- Fitness: A composite platform metric evaluating alpha quality, combining Sharpe ratio, turnover, and margin.
- Turnover: The rate at which the alpha portfolio changes its asset holdings, representing the transaction volume.
- Margin: The ratio of expected book returns to total transaction volume.
- Delay: The time lag between the collection of data and the execution of trades based on that data (e.g., Delay 1, Delay 2).
- Neutralization: A statistical adjustment subtracting market, industry, or sub-industry averages from alpha values to isolate idiosyncratic returns.
- Decay: The rate at which an alpha's predictive power and returns degrade over time.
- Coverage: The percentage of assets in the target universe for which the alpha generates non-zero predictions.
🤖 SYNTHRA Architecture Concepts
- Campaign (
CMP-XXXX): The primary Research Program. It serves as the bounding context for all hypotheses, experiments, and learnings, restricted by specific assets, regions, and themes. - Hypothesis (
HYP-XXXX): A structured document defining an economic rationale explaining why a specific relationship should yield predictability. - Experiment (
EXP-XXXX): A single backtest execution mapping to a hypothesis, generating specific logs and performance metrics. - Research Asset (
AST-XXXX): Any technical output produced during research (including Hypotheses, Expressions, Simulations, Visualizations, Correlation Reports, Notebooks, Parameter Sweeps, Summaries, Failure Analyses, Dataset Profiles). - Knowledge Record (
KNW-XXXX): A record capturing research discoveries, observations, evidence, conclusions, and confidence scores. - Research Memory: A persistence system caching historical campaign configurations, simulation logs, and performance metrics.
- Knowledge Graph: A conceptual representation linking datasets, mathematical operators, economic themes, and their empirical performance.
- Experiment Graph: A parent-child relational tree tracking the lineage of hypotheses, expression variations, and backtest results.
- Portfolio Intelligence: The layer that evaluates cross-strategy correlation, information ratio contribution, and overall portfolio diversification.
- Planner: The orchestration engine scheduling campaign tasks, managing dependencies, and routing messages.
- Governor: The highest system authority ("CEO") enforcing security, compliance boundaries, and resource budgets.
- LLM Router: A reasoning utility selecting the optimal model size, context limit, and cost profile for a given agent task.
- Department: An organizational structure grouping related agents (e.g., Research Department, Execution Department).
- Agent: A modular, single-responsibility AI actor executing tasks inside a department.
- ADR (
ADR-XXXX): Architecture Decision Record; a document capturing an engineering choice, its context, and its trade-offs. - RFC (
RFC-XXXX): Request for Comments; a proposal detailing a new feature or design specification, circulated for review before writing code. - Design Paper (
DESIGN-XXXX): A document analyzing technical options (pros/cons) and outlining the recommended implementation path before specifications are written. - Specification (
SPEC-XXXX): A document detailing the precise technical requirements and interface designs for a system component.