What does it take to break into the lucrative world of hedge funds? It’s a question that countless Wall Street up-and-comers would love to see answered, as they look to graduate from the 100-hour-per-week grind of banking to the relative glamour – and massive income opportunity – of hedgies.

It used to be that you had to be an Ivy League graduate with a Type-A personality and a razor sharp mind to even sniff the rarified air of hedge funds. Now, thanks to the democratizing effects of Boston startup Quantopian, those barriers to entry have never been lower.

Quantopian, which offers mathematicians and quantitative thinkers a turnkey platform to develop, test, and execute algorithmic trading strategies, has previously stated its intention of building a crowdsourced hedge fund. The company took a crucial first step in that direction this week by awarding the top trader in its community across the month of February $100,000 with which to trade for the next six months. The winner, American engineer Grant Kiehne, will get to keep all the profits generated during this period.

The prize is the first in what will be a series of monthly contests, collectively dubbed the Quantopian Open. Remarkably, prior to joining Quantopian among its first 1,000 members in 2012, Kiehne had no stock trading or professional finance experience. Now he’s beating amateur and professional quant traders from around the world and earning six-figure capital commitments as a result.

“I’m delighted with the quality and diversity in our contest pool,” Quantopian co-founder and CEO John Fawcett says. “We’re building a meritocracy here at Quantopian. Algorithm writing is no longer just for guys on Wall Street with exclusive access to the tools and data. With the Quantopian platform, anyone with a bit of coding skill and a mind for finance can start writing algorithms. The best ones win.”

The Quantopian Open invites participants to submit up to three trading algorithms per monthly contest, which will be judged based on a combination of live paper trading results during that period, as well as two years of backtesting against historical market data. Remarkably, Quantopian has made it such that contest entrants don’t need access to the $50,000 to $100,000 typically required to effectively test a trading strategy to participate. Rather, the company has so democratized things that quants of all means and backgrounds can enter the contest with nothing more than an internet connection and have an equal shot at winning the big prize.

The winning algorithm each month is deemed to be the one that, based on Quantopian’s analysis, offers the best combination of absolute return, risk-adjusted return (measured via Sharpe ratio), minimum volatility, minimum drawdown, and return stability. Further contest guidelines include that any algorithm that loses more than 10 percent of its net asset value, exceeds leverage limits (3X), and breaks stipulated trading guards is automatically disqualified. (The same rules apply during Kiehne’s six-months managing his winnings.) The contents of each participant’s algorithm remain a secret, in accordance with Quantopian’s policy.

Kiehne generated better than 90 percent annualized return on investment during the month, beating out a full-time NYC hedge fund CEO, who came in second, and a telecom specialist from Barcelona who finished third. He also had exceptionally stable results, according to Fawcett. The company is already in the midst of its March contest and will award another $100,000 at the end of the month. Kiehne, like all future winners, cannot participate in subsequent contests until his six-month asset management prize is completed.

Eventually, the plan is to have a stable of winning managers and mountains of data on the way various algorithms perform under different market conditions. Quantopian will then look to create the best possible multi-manager portfolio of approximately 30 algorithms, each weighted strategically and selected for minimum correlation, and sell that as a fund to outside investors. This remains a multi-year process at this stage, according to Fawce, who says that his company is still in the data gathering phase. Once it has enough data (and high-performing managers and algorithms), it will need to test the collective performance of the portfolio over many months (if not years) to create a track record that can be pitched to potential investors. The longer-term goal is to have multiple such funds, all addressing different investment strategies, asset classes, and risk profiles.

Despite the long road ahead, today marks a major milestone for the company. Three years ago when Fawce and his team set out to build Quantopian, the idea that an amateur trader from an unknown corner of the world could show his stuff online and as a result end up with real money to manage seemed like a far off fantasy.

Today, the company made that a reality for the very first time, giving its community of 30,000 of software developers, engineers, mathematicians, and finance pros around the world a taste of what making the big leagues might feel like. Sure, the money came from Quantopian’s own balance sheet, rather than from a giant pension fund or endowment. But it’s a step that will get the snowball rolling, while offering the Quantopian community a level of incentive and forced professionalism that has previously been absent. The traditional Wall Street career ladder is looking more and more like an artifact of a bygone era.