Mike Ryerson

Mike Ryerson, Voleon Group

The Benefits of Machine Learning for Quantitative Investing

Machine learning has become a hot buzzword among the systematic investment community, but there has been little discussion of why these techniques are particularly suited to this field or how they should be used as part of an overall investment process.  In this talk, I will review traditional approaches to quantitative investing, and discuss the potential advantages of a machine-learning based approach.  I will also discuss our general approach to implementing these techniques at Voleon.

Bio:

Mike Ryerson, Ph.D. – Senior Member of Research Staff

Mike Ryerson serves as a Senior Member of Research Staff for Voleon, and he is based in Berkeley, California. His career includes leadership roles in research and portfolio management.

Dr. Ryerson began his career at Capital One and then at Citigroup, where he worked as a statistical arbitrage trader for a proprietary equity trading desk. After Citigroup, Dr. Ryerson worked at Barclays Global Investors as Co-Head of Global Rates. Following Barclays, he worked at BlackRock as the Managing Director and Global Head of Research for their Fixed Income Global Alpha fund. In that role, he oversaw a thirty-person global quantitative research team tasked with the development of systematic investment strategies across a variety of asset classes and time horizons.

Dr. Ryerson received a Jaedicke Fellowship in recognition of outstanding academic performance while at Stanford, and his doctoral dissertation won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2004 European Finance Association’s annual meeting. Dr. Ryerson’s work has appeared in Institutional Investor and the Harvard Business Review. He has presented at the Stanford Conference in Quantitative Finance and the annual conference of the Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, and he has taught the MBA “Debt Markets” course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dr. Ryerson serves on the External Steering Committee for the Masters in Financial Engineering program at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Dr. Ryerson earned his Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and he holds a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude and first in his class. He is a CFA charterholder.