Buy-side quant says Brexit a ‘test’ of new AI

Natural language processing can give “more insight” into possible market shudders, says Simonian

The UK’s planned exit from the European Union could be a rare chance for quants to test how their machine learning models react to one-off political events.

Quants have traditionally been wary of trading around volatile, paradigm-shifting events that have few historical parallels. During the French elections last year, uncertainty over a possible victory for nationalist politician Marine Le Pen bamboozled so many quant models that some managers chose to turn them off completely.

But for the