Learning
AI in Trading & Quant Finance
The discipline, the tooling, and an honest account of what does not work.
Nothing on this page is investment advice and no link on it is a recommendation to trade. Most retail derivative accounts lose money. Anyone selling AI-generated signals, copy-trading or a guaranteed return is selling the thing that does not exist, and none of that is listed here.
Where to start
Read the warnings group first. That is not a formality — the single most useful thing this page can do is stop you paying for a signal service or an "AI trading bot", both of which are sold on the promise that they remove the need to understand any of this. Nothing here sells you a strategy, because anything genuinely profitable is not for sale. What is listed is the discipline: the statistics, the backtesting tooling that will show you your idea does not work, and the regulators who publish what the outcomes actually look like.
Before you risk anything4
The regulators publish the numbers. Read them before the courses.
- FCA ScamSmartStart hereFree
How investment fraud is actually pitched, and the register for checking whether a firm is authorised. The AI-trading-bot pitch is in here.
- SEC Investor.govStart hereFree
Plain-language investor education from the regulator, including specific alerts on AI-themed investment claims.
- SEBI Investor EducationStart hereFree
India’s regulator on what is and is not permitted, and how to verify an intermediary before you send money.
- ESMA Investor CornerStart hereFree
The EU regulator on leveraged products, including the loss statistics firms are required to publish.
Learn the discipline5
Quantitative finance is statistics with money attached. Do the statistics.
- QuantEcon LecturesAdvancedFree
Open lecture series in economic modelling with Python and Julia, written by working economists. The most rigorous free material here.
Full lecture course on the mathematics underneath derivatives and portfolio theory.
- Khan Academy: Finance and Capital MarketsStart hereFree
What an option, a bond and a balance sheet actually are. Start here if any of those words are fuzzy.
- Aswath DamodaranAdvancedFree
Full valuation courses, datasets and spreadsheets, published free by the person who wrote the textbook.
- MLFinLabAdvancedFree tier
Open implementations of the labelling and cross-validation methods that stop financial backtests lying to you.
Tools and data7
Test the idea on history before it costs you anything.
- BacktraderCoreFree
Mature Python backtesting framework. Slower than the newer ones and better documented than all of them.
- VectorBTAdvancedFree tier
Vectorised backtesting fast enough to sweep thousands of parameter combinations — which is also the fastest way to overfit, so pair it with proper validation.
- QuantLibAdvancedFree
The open-source library for derivative pricing and risk. What the industry checks its numbers against.
- yfinanceCoreFree
The usual free price history for experiments. Fine for learning, not clean enough to trade on.
- World Bank Open DataCoreFree
Free global development and macroeconomic indicators, with an open API and bulk downloads.
- OECD DataCoreFree
Comparable economic statistics across member countries. The series behind a great many charts you have seen.
- NSE IndiaStart hereFree
Official Indian market data, circulars and instrument lists, from the exchange itself.
About this list
16 resources, checked automatically every week so dead links do not sit here unnoticed. Nothing on this page is sponsored and none of these links pay us — which is the only reason a recommendation on it is worth anything. Every link goes to the original source, and we take nothing with you when you leave.