April 10, 2026
Agenda
8:00 - 9:00 am
Check-In / Reception
SMU Cox School of Business
- Light breakfast
- Networking
9:00 - 9:30 am
Kick-Off
SMU Cox School of Business
- Welcome and Introductions
Matt Burke
Agora Data - President & Chief Operating Officer
Dimitri Bianco
Founder of Fancy Quant
Shelly Heinrich
Senior Assistant Dean of Graduate Admissions and the Career Management Center at the Cox School
9:30 - 10:30 am
Track options:
Using Models and Minimizing Pain Points
Location: Main Stage
Scientific Method in the Age of AI
Location: TBD
Optimal Index Options Trading (Sponsored by Point72)
Location: TBD
10:30 - 11:00 am
Break
11:00 - 12:00 pm
Track options:
Use Cases in ML and AI for Investing
Location: Main Stage
CreditNLP: Fine-Tuning LLMs to Codify Expert Credit Risk Intuition
Location: TBD
Speaker: Paulo Cavallo
Experienced underwriters detect risk signals in narrative text that no regression model captures. This presentation walks through CreditNLP, a project that fine-tunes Mistral-7B using QLoRA to classify startup loan applications by reading the same unstructured text human underwriters would use. We'll cover the math of LoRA's low-rank decomposition, 4-bit quantization tradeoffs, and why 41.9 million trainable parameters on 400 examples doesn't overfit when you constrain the hypothesis space. The fine-tuned model achieved 93.9% accuracy compared to 60% for a frontier model with few-shot prompting, training in 41 minutes on free hardware.
Applied AI in Quant Finance
Location: TBD
Speaker: Jared Broad
Explores how to build a production-grade quantitative development LLM, walking through the architecture and hands-on setup of MCP, tool calling, and multi-agent workflows to accelerate research, backtesting, and live trading.
12:00 - 1:00 pm
Lunch
SMU Cox School of Business
- Lunch is included with registration.
1:00 - 2:00 pm
Track options:
The Future of Quant Education
Location: Main Stage
OpenBB Workspace
Location: TBD
2:00 - 2:15 pm
Break
2:15 - 3:15 pm
Track options:
The Future of Technology and Data
Location: Main Stage
Beyond the Mean-Variance Paradigm: Integrating Liquidity Dynamics and Market Impact in Institutional Asset Allocation
Location: TBD
3:15 - 4:15 pm
Keynote
SMU Cox School of Business
Host: Jeff Ryan
The quant community is often segmented into specialties, locations, jobs, sub-cultures, and industries. We’ll explore the quantitative finance community, discuss how to make it a better place, and how to overcome the current hurdles.
4:15 - 4:45 pm
Closing
SMU Cox School of Business
- As we wrap up an eventful day filled with insights and inspiration, join us in celebrating our Quant of the Year 2026, sponsored by Agora Data. This prestigious recognition honors outstanding contributions to the quant community, highlight innovation and excellence.
4:45 - 6:00 pm
Networking Reception
SMU Cox School of Business
- Join us for a delightful dessert reception. Indulge in sweet treats while networking with fellow attendees, exploring student displays, and engaging with our esteemed speakers. Capture the moment with photos and make connections that could spark your next big idea. Don’t miss out on this sweet opportunity to mingle and celebrate a successful day at this year’s Quaint Quant Conference.