How QRT powers real-time research and risk management at petabyte scale

Summary

Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), a global quantitative investment manager headquartered in London, uses ClickHouse Cloud for a data platform that serves researchers and for near-real-time risk monitoring, management, and P&L. Founded in 2018 as a cloud-native firm after the spinout of Credit Suisse’s proprietary trading arm, QRT chose a cloud-based approach rather than inheriting decades of on-premise infrastructure. The platform supports two major systems, while ClickStack consolidates logs, metrics, and traces for observability; alerts, log queries, and metric aggregations run against a single ClickHouse instance using standard SQL. QRT says its previous database was constrained by writer and reader counts and total cluster load, whereas ClickHouse provides greater speed and scalability, and that a unified monitoring backend simplifies maintenance while remaining reliably fast.

Takeaways

1. 1

   QRT uses ClickHouse Cloud across a centralized research platform and a near-real-time risk monitoring, management, and P&L system.

2. 2

   ClickStack brought QRT’s logs, metrics, and traces onto a single backend, allowing alerts, log queries, and metric aggregations to use standard SQL.

3. 3

   QRT reports that its previous database imposed writer, reader, and cluster-load limits, while the new setup is faster, more scalable, and simpler to maintain for monitoring.