---
title: "How QRT powers real-time research and risk management at petabyte scale"
description: "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."
---

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

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Jun 9, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## 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.

## Context

Quantitative trading requires storing more data, querying it faster, and acting on it first. QRT’s previous database limited the number of writers and readers as well as the total load per cluster, motivating the search for a faster and more scalable system.

## Approach / What changed

QRT uses ClickHouse Cloud for a centralized research data platform and a near-real-time risk monitoring, management, and P&L system. It also uses ClickStack to consolidate logs, metrics, and traces onto one ClickHouse backend, where alerts, log queries, and metric aggregations run with standard SQL.

## Takeaways

- QRT uses ClickHouse Cloud across a centralized research platform and a near-real-time risk monitoring, management, and P&L system.
- ClickStack brought QRT’s logs, metrics, and traces onto a single backend, allowing alerts, log queries, and metric aggregations to use standard SQL.
- 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.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Data Pipelines](https://yomu.fyi/topic/data-pipelines), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/qrt)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/qrt
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-29T01:34:39.723Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/qrt)