AI Fintech North America

The Université de Sherbrooke Partners With Laplace Insights to Predict Financial Market Movements

The Université de Sherbrooke and Laplace Insights, an emerging investment intelligence firm in Sherbrooke, have partnered to address the challenge of accurately predicting financial market movements in the investment industry by combining the power of artificial intelligence with human intelligence.

Market prices are influenced by thousands of financial and economic factors, including country dynamics, government policies, central bank interventions and the environment. While quantitative models are widely used in investment management today, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in portfolio management is still in its early stages.

“By partnering with the Université de Sherbrooke, we are able to offer an investment intelligence service that is truly at the cutting-edge of AI research. Our goal is to provide our clients, financial advisors and portfolio managers, with the most relevant information and exceptionally high-quality predictions on financial market behaviour based on the recommendations of our machine learning algorithms,” says Jean-Marc Patenaude, President of Laplace Insights. “Our customers and partners in Canada and the United States are pleased with the project outcomes so far since we can provide them with highly relevant information that helps to better assess the opportunities, risks and uncertainties in financial markets. Our services are particularly appreciated now due do the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

For more than three years, Laplace Insights has been collaborating closely with Professor Shengrui Wang of the Department of Computer Science at the University’s Faculty of Science. An expert in advanced AI research, Professor Wang and his team develop new, high performance AI algorithms that are specifically optimized to predict financial market movements using data from thousands of different data sources.

“Our research efforts focus on developing algorithms specifically designed to adapt to new and uncertain market situations,” said Professor Wang. “Our algorithms help predict structural breaks corresponding to major changes in the markets, and identify the factors associated with these breaks. This is particularly relevant in today’s markets given the major economic upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic because it provides vital information that helps investment managers make better quality and more informed investment decisions.”

Since 2017, 18 students in computer science, mathematics, finance and computer engineering, from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, have contributed to the project as part of the university’s cooperative internship programs or as members of the research staff. This provides them with a unique training experience allowing them to collaborate with multidisciplinary stakeholders in a leading-edge field.

Professor Guy Bellemare of the Department of Finance at the Universities Business School said: “This comes close to the real-life professional work environment where operating within multidisciplinary teams is a must-have to innovate. The students also had the opportunity to make a tangible and significant contribution to an emerging business in the field of financial technology, located right here in the Eastern Townships,”

The Business Partnership Group of the Université de Sherbrooke worked closely with Laplace Insights and contributed to establishing the partnership with professors Shengrui Wang and Guy Bellemare, in order to build a strong research team. The project also received support from financial partners. In the last three years, Laplace Insights, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Prompt and Mitacs have contributed more than $500,000.

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Author

  • Polly is a journalist, content creator and general opinion holder from North Wales. She has written for a number of publications, usually hovering around the topics of fintech, tech, lifestyle and body positivity.

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