A king of French quants launched this AI Masters course for finance professionals

First came the Masters in Finance. Then came the Masters in Financial Engineering. Now, comes the Masters in AI and investing.

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This isn't its exact name, but it's close enough. Known by the intense acronym of MScT AI MaQI, the 'Masters in AI for Markets and Quantitative Investment' is a new course. It's being run by France's prestigious mathematics school - Institut Polytechnique - together with Ensae, another French school known for its statistical expertise.

The progenitor of MScT AI MaQI at Institut Polytechnique is a senior figure in the French quant community. Before he became a professor at Polytechnique, Charles-Albert Lehalle was global head of quantitative research and development at ADIA, the sovereign wealth fund known for its generosity in the desert. Before that, he was global head of quant research at Credit Agricole.

Lehalle is a veteran of machine learning in financial services. He completed his PhD in the subject 25 years ago and has been working in the field ever since. The new MScT AI MaQI course is "very selective," he tells us. It will only have 25 places and has already had 200 applicants. Admission will depend upon academic history and a 20 minute interview. International and French students are expected to apply; it's taught in English.

Lehalle already works with PhD students focused on machine learning in finance, so the new Masters is a democratisation of sorts. Like senior figures at hedge fund Citadel, Lehalle says AI isn't as much about direct alpha generation as supporting the human alpha generators.

AI tools can be used to speed up risk pricing calculations, says Lehalle. "When you use AI, you can explore multiple different situations very quickly." In this sense, AI is more relevant for risk professionals than for portfolio managers. However, he notes that AI tools can also be used to help interpret alternative data sets and for now casting, and that this can be more helpful in alpha generation when it gives portfolio managers an edge.

The new MScT AI MaQI course runs over two years, each costing €19k. Graduates might go on to work for hedge fund Qube Research and Technologies, which is a partner. If not, BNP Paribas' CIB is a partner too.

"The first year will be machine learning and AI and quant finance – portfolio construction, time series, dimension reduction, complexity of models, overfitting," says Lehalle. "The second year will be about how to use machine learning tools to answer financial questions and for risk and now-casting." There's an extra module on large language models too, if anyone's interested. 

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