Buy-Side Equity Quant Analysis: Tools and Open Problems, featuring BAM

Join CSAIL Alliances and their member company, BAM, on Thursday, September 11th, 2025 12:00pm in STAR (32-D463). The distance between a finance academic and a finance practitioner is quite large, especially if the practitioner works for a prop trading firm or a hedge fund. In this talk I will talk about some of the tools of the trade in use by buy-side firms, some of the open problems they face. Time permitting, I will briefly discuss modeling crowding phenomena, backtesting protocols, challenges to factor models and spiked covariance matrices, aggregation and attribution of large signal sets, and portfolios from ranks.

Gappy Paleologo, Global Head of Quantitative Research Giuseppe Paleologo is global head of Quantitative Research at Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) and a member of the firm’s Investment Committee. Paleologo joined BAM from Hudson River Trading, where he served as head of Risk Management. Before that, he was the head of Enterprise Risk at Millennium, director of Equities Quantitative Research at Citadel, a Systematic portfolio manager at Red Alder, and a director at Axioma (now part of Deutsche Börse). Paleologo authored "Advanced Portfolio Management" and recently published his second book, "The Elements of Quantitative Investing" in 2025. Paleologo has a Ph.D. in Management Science and Operations Research, a Master of Science in Operations Research, and a Master of Science in Statistics, all from Stanford University. He also has a Master of Science in Physics from the University of Rome.

Please register here: https://bambusdev.my.site.com/s/details?jobReq=9-11%3A-MIT-Tech-Talk-with-Gappy-Paleologo-_REQ7218