AI and Finance
Learn how artificial intelligence is reshaping financial analysis, investment strategies, and decision-making in modern markets.
AI and Finance
Learn how artificial intelligence is reshaping financial analysis, investment strategies, and decision-making in modern markets.
Discover how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of finance, from the broader relationship between fintech and AI to the cutting-edge paradigms shaping the field today. In this course, you'll explore how AI is changing financial decision-making across narratives, market learning, investment analysis, trading, and language-based tasks. You'll gain a conceptual map of the two major paradigms driving change in the industry—reinforcement learning and large language models—and learn how each is applied to real financial problems.
What you'll learn
- Explain how artificial intelligence, including large language models, is reshaping financial analysis, investment processes, and decision-making across the industry
- Understand the core concepts of reinforcement learning in finance, including states, actions, rewards, and exploration–exploitation trade-offs
- Evaluate the usefulness of reinforcement learning for developing trading strategies and studying market dynamics in noisy, adaptive financial environments
- Assess the opportunities and limitations of large language models in finance, including practical applications and the challenges of bias, interpretability, and responsible deployment
Meet your instructors
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Professor -
Ph.D. Candidate -
Senior Lecturer
Andrew W. Lo
Andrew W. Lo
Professor
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has published extensively in academic journals (see https://alo.mit.edu) and was named one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world.” He has received awards for teaching from both MIT and Wharton.
Major Works:
- Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
- The Econometrics of Financial Markets
- A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street
Social Links:
Jillian A. Ross
Jillian A. Ross
Ph.D. Candidate
Jillian Ross is a final year PhD candidate at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where she is a member of the Laboratory of Financial Engineering advised by Professor Andrew W. Lo. Her research is supported by the MIT Presidential Fellowship and the Mathworks Engineering Fellowship. Ross has also spent time at J.P. Morgan, BlueCove Limited (now Ares Systematic Credit), and Replicate.
Ross holds a SM in Computer Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science and Philosophy from Columbia Engineering. While an undergraduate at Columbia, Ross worked on problems in multimodal deep learning with Professor Carl Vondrick and was involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem on campus.
Paul F. Mende
Paul F. Mende
Senior Lecturer
Paul Mende is a Senior Lecturer in the Finance Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Mende co-founded, co-owned, and served as director of research from 2002 to 2010 for Fort Hill Capital Management, LLC, a hedge fund specializing in equity derivatives and dedicated to quantitative research, trading, and risk management. Fort Hill actively participated in the launch and success of Bay Hill Fund LP and Bay Hill Capital Management LLC in 2007 as a multi-strategy volatility hedge fund. In 2004, Fort Hill launched Absolute Strategies Fund and Absolute Investment Advisers LLC as an innovative absolute-return fund-of-funds structured as a Securities and Exchange Commission registered mutual fund, with daily liquidity for investors and full position-level transparency from managers.
Mende previously held positions as director of the Money Management & Trading Group at Cambridge Technology Partners, Inc., and as an analyst in the Quantitative Strategies Group at MDT Advisers, Inc. He also held positions as an assistant professor of physics at Brown University and as a research associate at the Center for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
Mende holds an AB in physics from Harvard University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University.