I’m a big fan of the Harvard Business Review, so I wasn’t entirely sure whether to take this article seriously: “Please don’t hire a chief artificial intelligence officer” The gist of it is: AI strategy is for firms where the product itself is AI (Google, Microsoft etc). Non-tech firms should just make sure the techies are … More How to build an AI driven business
Yann LeCun, arguably the father of modern machine learning, has described Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as the most interesting idea in deep learning in the last 10 years (and there have been a lot of interesting ideas in Machine Learning over the past 10 years). From a trading perspective, or any game theoretic activity in which … More Deep Learning’s Killer App for Finance?
Clearly I’ve not blogged here for over a year…. and what a year it’s been (well, for me at least). To cut a long story short, I decided to go full time on the machine learning aspect of my day job, and call it day (for now at least) on the trading front. Either way, … More Metamorphosis
In my last post I talked about building powerful feature sets by stepping outside of industry specific data conventions that are often historical artefacts (Stop thinking like a human!). It got me thinking more broadly about the psychology of feature selection. The example I gave was the use of technical indicators in finance but you can … More The Zen of Machine Learning
I’ve been working some cross sectional equity models which are outside my usual domain of macro assets and credit. Rather than build a feature set comprised of standard technical indicators (think TA-Lib) and fundamental data (earnings etc) I decided to build some indicators from first principles, and forget about fundamental data. So what did I … More Stop thinking like a human!
So McKinsey gets the joke on machine learning in banks: it will soon be embedded everywhere. Here’s a link to a presentation I gave to some investment banks a couple of months ago. It’s focussed on credit trading desks, but applies generally to any fixed income OTC product. As always with the banks, it will … More How Machine Learning will change OTC trading at the Investment Banks
I just added the following disclaimer to my ‘About’ page because I thought by writing this blog I might encourage someone to do something stupid: “Disclaimer: I know this is a cliche but I had probably better say it: nothing on this blog constitutes investment advice. Furthermore, I would advise 99.9% of people do not even … More Your Computer Science/Physics/Maths PhD will NOT protect you from yourself.
Maybe I’ve seen enough ‘headline bingo’ to last a lifetime (prior Geek crises, bank bailouts, US debt ceiling cliffhangers, QE announcements…), but a few things really stand out this time: When faced with unpredictable chaos (in the technical sense of both terms), market participants go into analytical overdrive; prognosticating, publishing, tweeting, blogging, holding conference calls, … More (Market) Behavioural takeaways: Greece – 2015 edition
The Google research blog posted this last week: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks It’s stunningly beautiful and gives some intuition as to what is going within the hidden layers of image recognition artificial neural networks (ANNs). It’s not surprising it gained mainstream media coverage. What strikes me as more profound are the implications for … More The strange case of the hallucinating AI’s
In my work as a trader and portfolio manager I have built numerous trading strategies employing machine learning (ML) methods. My experience has been very much based on trial and error – trying to build practical solutions to real business problems and tackling challenges as they arise. I have an academic background in both physics and … More Why markets and machine learning?
Aldous Birchall 