This introductory level workshop will give you the ability to navigate the world of quantitative finance. It will focus on core principles of rigorous statistical research, and try to teach overall intuitions so you are comfortable learning more on your own. It will discuss the workflow of designing trading strategies and executing them in the market with practical examples based on the Quantopian platform.

Over the last two decades, trading has seen a remarkable evolution from open-outcry in the Wall Street pits to screen trading all the way to current automation and high-frequency trading (HFT). The success of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) seems like natural progression for the evolution of trading. However, unlike other fields of AI, trading has some domain specific problems that project the dream of set-it-and-forget-it money making machines still some way in the future. This talk will describe the current challenges for intelligent autonomous trading systems and provides some practical examples where machine learning is already being used in financial applications.