Artificial intelligence?

[Redok]

I'm currently thinking of what undergraduate program I should apply for to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to increase my own likelihood of success as a derivatives trader who manages his own assets with the help of quantitative tools.

The first thing that came in my mind was Artificial intelligence because it connects: philosophy , uncertainty management , logic & the foundations of mathematics , computer science , statistics , linguistics , physics , biology and other fields of mathematics like optimization , control theory , probability etc. Also , it has multiple applications in technology , finance , medicine , data mining and much more.

Is Artificial intelligence a good start for my educational goal? If not , could you explain why?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Fahad Sheikh]

No..i don't think this is a good start for you if you want to start your career as a quant...try to specialize in a program which have more quantitative and finance subjects.Artificial Intelligence is not the way you are looking for.hope you understand.

 

[AndrewChang]

I'm currently thinking of what undergraduate program I should apply for to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to increase my own likelihood of success as a derivatives trader who manages his own assets with the help of quantitative tools.

The first thing that came in my mind was Artificial intelligence because it connects: philosophy , uncertainty management , logic & the foundations of mathematics , computer science , statistics , linguistics , physics , biology and other fields of mathematics like optimization , control theory , probability etc. Also , it has multiple applications in technology , finance , medicine , data mining and much more.

Is Artificial intelligence a good start for my educational goal? If not , could you explain why?

Thanks in advance.

don't listen to him. artificial intelligence is awesome.

 

[donny]

Hello Redok. I can sense and appreciate your excitement in embarking in a journey to learn artificial intelligence with the eventual goal to use it in derivatives trading. Perhaps, I can give some quick thoughts. Math and cs major here with a year plus experience in a hedge fund.

I advice is to first learn the theory even if it means not seeing any applications in trading yet. Your saying that three quarters of the whole science universe applies to artificial intelligence could be true. However, you not knowing specifics doesn't help much. If the goal is to use an abstract concept and apply it to trading, one must know the concept and its specifics first before applying it.

Two examples come to mind:
1. I am in the midst of applying a hidden Markov model (part of machine learning which is part of A.I.) in a trading engine. From the theory all the way to the coding, I can safely say that 90% of my success came from knowing HMMs well 10% from knowing currencies well.

2. (Not A.I. but somewhat related as it follows the same application process) When I was tasked to figure out improved way to enter positions, I faintly recalled the "Optimal Stopping Theorem" in stochastic calculus and thought it might be of used. I went back to check the theorem out. Understanding it required knowledge of another five concepts in mathematics. Blessed with a course on stochastic calculus and measure theory, I could quickly fit the uses of the theorem to the trading idea.

My point is that I was once very intrigued by how artificial intelligence or how stochastic calculus could fit into finance. Now, I see that my appreciation and later application of such concepts in trading ultimately comes only if you are well verse in the theory. I believe that there are not short cuts in this and the journey to actually study the theory without an anticipation of the applications can't be bypass.

In short, take a course of artificial intelligence in an academic setting, like it for what it is and then return back to trading and see how it can be applied.

 

[mhy]

Purely from a quant job perspective, the related area of machine learning may also be relevant.
If you like CS then do an undergrad in CS. If you are interested in AI, take all the AI courses your school has to offer. (My school only had one AI course and one ML course, unfortunately)