Philosophy
COLOBUS is a service offered by Quant Monkeys UG. The young FinTech company was founded at the heart of Munich’s startup scene in early 2017. Our mission is to make investments in the stock market a lucrative and transparent endeavor for private individuals.
All of our products are developed with the firm belief that an algorithm - once it has been properly trained and validated - will make better investment decisions than a human. An algorithm does not get tired, it is not emotional and it cannot be impressed by shiny investor brochures. Additionally, we believe there is great potential in the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to financial data.
Founder
Klaas Klasing, Ph.D.
Ever since Klaas participated in a stock simulation game of his local savings bank as a teenager, he has been fascinated by the question whether and how private investors can systematically make money in the ups and downs of the stock market. After exploring different investment styles and reading several eye-opening books, he eventually became a passionate quantitative value investor.
With experience both as a founder and a software engineer, Klaas sees the financial world from a technological point of view. Previously, he worked with methods of artificial intelligence during his robotics Ph.D. at TU Munich and algorithms for mobility planning while at BMW research. Klaas was all the more suprised to learn that many professional financial advisors still base their recommendations on a few manually assembled excel analyses. After he spent months looking in vain for a profitable, algorithmically tested investment service to grow his personal savings, at the end of 2016 he decided to build COLOBUS and make it accessible to other private investors.
Why the name?
A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.
Burton G. Malkiel
With this provocative posit from his investment classic “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” Princeton professor Malkiel made an important point: It is not possible to predict the short-term movement of the stock market - neither for charting experts nor for monkeys. For long-term investment periods, though, the story is different. COLOBUS, named after the black-and-white old world monkey, is the first primate of the Quant Monkey family. He is here to ensure that you can beat the market (and numerous experts) in the long run.