I was invited back as a guest lecturer at the HEC Paris FinTech Summer School, where I taught Quantitative Finance on July 7th, 2026. This followed my 2025 course in the same “FinTech: The Future of Finance” program.

The lecture was built around one idea: quantitative finance is not about knowing the future — it is about making better decisions when the future is uncertain. The journey unfolded across seven parts:

Can We Predict the Future?

  • From a 51% edge to a business: costs, asymmetry and risk
  • Prediction is not trading

Capital Markets Landscape

  • Banks and profit centers
  • Market making, asset management and hedge funds, execution desks, prop trading
  • The role of quants in each

Financial Engineering Foundations

  • Stochastic processes, Black and Scholes, Monte Carlo simulations
  • Optimal execution: Almgren and Chriss, Avellaneda and Stoikov

Systematic Strategies

  • Trend, mean reversion and intraday seasonality — from intuition to backtested P&L
  • Judging a strategy in the right order, and why backtests are dangerous

Portfolio Optimization

  • Combining many imperfect strategies, diversification and the efficient frontier

Machine Learning in Trading

  • Why financial ML is genuinely hard
  • Supervised learning, validation by walking forward in time
  • Reinforcement learning for FX trading

Generative AI in Trading

  • Cross-sectional momentum, value and quality strategies
  • LLMs as signal extractors — and why not to ask an LLM “what should I buy?”
  • Multi-agent system design for equity trading

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