Discussion 1: The New Quant - LLMs in Finance

Discussion 1: The New Quant - LLMs in Finance#

Session Plan#

  1. Who am I — Introductions and background

  2. Syllabus — Course overview, structure, and expectations

  3. The New Quant — Survey of LLM applications in finance (Fu 2025)

  4. Expected Returns and LLMs — The Lopez-Lira & Tang finding on scale and financial sentiment

  5. HW0 in class — Environment setup and tool installation

  6. HW1 — Will be released in the next day or two

Topics#

  • LLMs Transforming Finance — A tour of how LLMs are reshaping quantitative finance across 6+ application categories

  • AI Copilots Intro — Getting started with Claude Code and Cursor for AI-assisted development

  • Expected Returns and LLMs — Why model scale matters for financial sentiment classification

  • ChartBook: Cataloging Research — Using ChartBook to make research repositories discoverable by humans and AI agents

Read on Your Own#

  • API and Structured Outputs — Calling LLM APIs (OpenAI, OpenRouter) and extracting structured data with Pydantic

Contents