AI, machine learning, and NLP for finance
- Full IVADO Professor, Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal
- Holder, Research Professorship in Sentometrics
- Director, MSc in Financial Engineering
- Associate Editor, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Statistical Software, R Journal
- Fellow, Institut Louis Bachelier and Institute for Sustainable Finance
- Formerly, several quant roles in the industry
About
I'm a quant at heart. I build methods that turn messy data — prices, news, filings, anything written down — into signals for risk, portfolios, and the economy. Financial econometrics is my home base; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing are how I get there. Above all, I like working with people — colleagues, co-authors, and students. That part matters to me as much as the results.
I've been shipping open-source code for twenty years. With my team I maintain a dozen R packages on CRAN — GARCH and regime-switching models, risk-based portfolios, textual sentiment, global optimization — because a method nobody can run is a method that doesn't exist. I'm also active in Sentometrics Research, bridging text mining, sentiment analysis, and econometrics, and FAME, a joint Paris Dauphine–PSL and HEC Montréal initiative on generative AI and large language models in financial markets.
If you like clicking links, here is the institutional trail: I am an elected member of the ISI, a member of CIRANO, CIREQ, CRM, Fin-ML, GERAD, OBVIA, the Penner Institute, and Quantact, and an instructor at DataCamp.
Selected publications
- Efficient estimation of bid-ask spreads from open, high, low, and close prices, Journal of Financial Economics 2024, with Guidotti & Kroencke [Code/Data]
- Is it alpha or beta? Decomposing hedge fund returns when models are misspecified, Journal of Financial Economics 2024, with Barras, Scaillet & Gagligardini [Code]
- Linking frequentist and Bayesian change-point methods, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 2024, with Dufays & Ordas
- Climate change concerns and the performance of green versus brown stocks, Management Science 2023, with Bluteau, Boudt & Inghelbrecht [Data]
- Media abnormal tone, earnings announcements, and the stock market, Journal of Financial Markets 2022, with Bluteau & Boudt
- The peer performance ratios of hedge funds, Journal of Banking & Finance 2017, with Boudt [Code]
For the complete list of publications and working papers, see the Research page.
Book
Financial Risk Management with Bayesian Estimation of GARCH Models
Bayesian estimation of GARCH models by MCMC, and what it buys you for risk measurement — the methods behind my bayesGARCH package.