The Premier Event for Quantitative Investment Thought Leaders
Paul Bilokon
CEO and Founder Thalesians
Paul A. Bilokon is CEO and Founder of Thalesians Ltd. He has previously served as Director at Deutsche Bank, where he ran the global credit and core quant teams, part of Markets Electronic Trading (MET) group. He is one of the pioneers of electronic trading in credit, including indices, single names, and cash, and has worked in e-trading, derivatives pricing, and quantitative finance at bulge bracket institutions, including Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Nomura, and Citigroup. His more than a decade-long career spans many asset classes: equities, FX spot and options, rates and credit.
Paul has graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with a distinction, and twice from Imperial College London. The domain-theoretic framework for continuous-time stochastic processes, developed with Prof. Abbas Edalat, earned him a PhD degree and a prestigious LICS paper. Paul's other academic interests include stochastic filtering and machine learning. He is an expert developer in C++, Java, Python, and kdb+/q, with a special interest in high performance scientific computing.
His interests in philosophy and finance led him to formulate the vision for and found Thalesians, a consultancy and think tank of dedicated professionals working in quant finance, economics, mathematics, physics and computer science, the focal point of a community with over 2,500 members worldwide. Thalesians was co-founded with two of Paul's friends and colleagues, Saeed Amen and Matthew Dixon.
Dr. Bilokon is a joint winner of the Donald Davis Prize (2005), winner of the British Computing Society Award for the Student Making the Best Use of IT (World Leadership Forum's SET award, 2005), Ward Foley Memorial Scholarship (2001), two University of London High Achiever Awards (in mathematics and physics, 1999); a Member of the British Computer Society, Institution of Engineering and Technology, and European Complex Systems Society; Associate of the Securities and Investment Institute, and Royal College of Science; and a frequent speaker at premier conferences such as Global Derivatives, alphascope, LICS, and Domains.
Day 2: 15 October
9:00 AM The next frontier in Quant Finance: From Alpha models to autonomous market systems
Over the past three decades, quantitative finance has evolved from handcrafted factor models to sophisticated machine learning–driven alpha generation. Yet the field remains constrained by a paradigm that treats models as isolated engines for signal extraction rather than integrated, adaptive decision-making entities.
In this talk, I will outline the research agenda that takes quant finance beyond alpha — towards autonomous market systems capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting in dynamic market environments.
Drawing on my research, I will demonstrate how advances in AI, distributed systems, and stochastic control can be fused to create self-optimising, interpretable trading frameworks.
These systems not only learn in real time but also manage execution, risk, and portfolio construction as an integrated whole, closing the loop between prediction and action. The implications go beyond trading: autonomous market systems have the potential to reshape market microstructure, redefine the role of human oversight, and challenge our regulatory and ethical frameworks.
This is the next frontier, where the boundaries between quantitative research, AI, and market design dissolve.
Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Paul.
Download The Latest Agenda
