Biography
Marcos López de Prado is global head of Quantitative R&D at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), and professor of practice at Cornell University, where he teaches AI at the College of Engineering. Over the past 25 years, he has helped modernize finance by pioneering machine learning and statistical inference methods that are now widely adopted at some of the largest investment corporations. The US Congress has invited him to testify on AI policy, he is the named inventor in numerous patents, and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) ranks him among the 10 most-read authors in Economics. His contributions have earned him several scientific, state, and industry awards, including the National Award for Academic Excellence (1999) from the Kingdom of Spain, the Quant Researcher of the Year Award (2019) from Portfolio Management Research, the Buy-Side Quant of the Year Award (2021) from Risk.net, and the Bernstein Fabozzi / Jacobs Levy Award (2024) from The Journal of Portfolio Management. In 2024, His Majesty King Felipe VI and the Government of Spain appointed him Knight Officer of the Royal Order of Civil Merit (OMC), "for distinguished services to science and the global investment industry." For more details, visit: QuantResearch.org.
Why factor investing often fails in practice — and how causal reasoning helps quant models perform in the real world.