Disclosure

Last updated: August 1, 2026

Research tooling is only worth anything if you know who pays for it and what the people producing it stand to gain. This page states the conflicts that exist and the ones that will exist once the platform is operating.

Who operates this site

QuantCrystal is operated by Steve Horton as a sole proprietorship in Texas, United States. It is the paid tier of the same operation that runs MarketCrystal. The two sites share an owner, a design system, and the underlying Trismegistus analysis engine. They are not independent parties, and nothing on one should be read as third-party validation of the other.

How we are compensated

Currently: not at all. QuantCrystal has no customers, no subscriptions, no advertising, and no affiliate relationships. Nothing on this site is monetized today.

The intended model is subscription revenue, which creates a specific conflict worth naming:

• We are paid to make tooling look valuable. A vendor selling backtesting and simulation has a commercial incentive to present results that make systematic trading look more tractable than it is. Our stated defence against this is the methodology — real-engine execution, frozen parameters, forward paper records — which is deliberately designed to produce worse-looking numbers than a promotional approach would. You should hold us to it and disbelieve us where we fail to follow it.
• We publish no track record. No performance claims appear on this site because none have been earned in public. Any figure used to explain a method is labelled illustrative.

Positions and trading

The operator of QuantCrystal trades his own capital and develops the strategies described here for his own account. This means the operator may hold positions in instruments discussed on this site, and may act on the output of the same engine that serves subscribers.

We do not accept payment to feature, promote, or issue signals on any specific security, digital asset, or instrument, and we do not accept compensation from issuers, exchanges, brokers, or asset managers in exchange for coverage or favourable treatment. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before the fact, not after.

No client relationship

Using this site, joining the waitlist, or subscribing does not create an advisory, fiduciary, or brokerage relationship. We do not manage money, hold client funds, take custody of assets, place trades for you, or exercise discretion over any account. Advisory guidance, where offered, is technical assistance with building and testing systems — not a recommendation to trade, and not personalized investment advice. See the Terms of Service and Disclaimer.

Data providers

We intend to license or consume data from third parties including Sharadar, Binance, FRED, and SEC EDGAR. We have no equity interest in these providers and receive no compensation from them. We pay them, or use their public data under their terms. Naming a provider on the datasets page is a statement of technical intent, not an endorsement of that provider as an investment.

AI disclosure

Analysis and written content on this site may be generated or assisted by artificial intelligence (Anthropic's Claude). We are not compensated by Anthropic and have no relationship with them beyond being a paying customer of their API. AI-generated content is subject to the accuracy limitations set out in the disclaimer.

Why we disclose this

The entire value of a methodology page is that a reader can check whether our incentives point the same way as the claims we make. They do not always. A subscription business benefits when you believe systematic trading will work for you, and that belief is not always correct. Knowing where our interest sits is a precondition for reading anything else here properly.

Contact

Questions about anything disclosed here can be sent to contact@quantcrystal.com. Email is the only contact channel we publish.