Service discontinued

Pair Trading Lab has closed.

We built it in 2011 and ran it for fifteen years. The service was permanently shut down on 1 October 2026: the website, the pair database, the backtester, the analyzer, the portfolio tools and the API are all offline for good. The same company, Quantverse OÜ, is building what comes next.

Go to Quantverse → Get PTL Trader

PTL Trader is still here — and still free

PTL Trader is open source under GPLv3 and did not shut down with the website. The current version runs standalone, without the PTL website and API, so you can keep trading your pair portfolios through Interactive Brokers.

github.com/quantverse/ptltrader

Where pairs break

Anyone who ran pairs for more than a year met the same three failure modes. None of them was a bug in Pair Trading Lab — they are properties of the two-name unit, and the fix is to change the unit.

01
The relationship goes away and the spread does not come back
Cointegration on two years of data is a statement about those two years. When one company is acquired or changes its business, the spread walks off and the model keeps adding because the z-score says it is cheap.
02
Two names is not diversification
Every pair carried the full idiosyncratic risk of both legs. One earnings miss on the short leg was a full-position loss, and pair-level neutrality said nothing about the net exposure of ten pairs held together.
03
Ten million pairs is a multiple-testing machine
Screen enough pairs and some pass a cointegration test by chance. The backtester could tell you the in-sample result; it could not tell you how many pairs you looked at to find it.

From pairs to portfolios

You give the platform a research brief in plain language. An agent builds the point-in-time universe, computes features under the same as-of discipline, runs walk-forward folds with purging and embargo, and writes a note with the equity curve, regime split and drawdown attribution. You read it the way you used to read a backtest report, and then you decide.

Quantverse is opening in beta to a small group of funds and independent researchers. If you want a seat, subscribe on the home page or write to info@quantverse.com and tell us you came from Pair Trading Lab.

quantverse.com Read the full note

Thank you for fifteen years

A pair was a portfolio of two names and one hedge ratio, and fifteen years taught us the ratio was never the hard part. The hard part was everything around it: the search that found the pair, the regime that broke it, the ten other pairs in the same book, and the data that quietly forgot the companies that had disappeared. Thank you to everyone who searched the database, argued with the backtester, and ran PTL Trader through more than one bad month.

— The Quantverse team