Academic Roles
Professor of Finance, Department of Finance, HEC Montréal
Director, Canadian Derivatives Institute
Co-responsible, BNI-HEC Montréal Fund
Non-Academic Roles
Chief Financial Officer, Delta Vega Financial
Senior Director, Financial Risk Management, KPMG
About Me
I am a full professor of Finance at HEC Montréal (the Business School of the University of Montreal), where I have been a faculty member since 2006. My research focuses on asset pricing, market microstructure and financial econometrics as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data. I currently teach Portfolio Management in the M.Sc. in Finance and Financial Engineering programs at HEC Montreal. In the past, I taught courses in empirical methods in finance, investments, and corporate finance at various academic levels. I also serve as the Director of the Canadian Derivatives Institute, leading research initiatives and executive education programs in derivatives and quantitative finance. I also co-manage the NBC-HEC Montréal Fund, a student-run investment portfolio with more than $7 million in assets under management.
Beyond academia, I serve as Chief Financial Officer of Delta Vega Financial, which specializes in risk assessment and valuation of structured products. I am also a Senior Director of Financial Risk Management at KPMG, where I advise major Canadian pension funds and financial institutions on the validation of portfolio and risk management models.
I held various academic positions at Alliance Manchester Business School, Warwick Business School, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). I hold a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics, M.Sc. in Statistics from UCSD and a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkiye.
Research
Research Interests
Primary Fields: Asset Pricing, Market Microstructure, Financial Econometrics, Portfolio Management.
Secondary Fields: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data.
Selected Publications
- "Reaction of Stock Returns to News about Fundamentals" , Management Science, vol. 61, no. 5, 2015, p. 1072–1093.
- "Bid versus Ask Liquidity in the NYSE Limit Order Book" , with G. Grass, Journal of Financial Markets, 38, 2018, 14–38.
- "Do Return Prediction Models Add Economic Value?" , with A. Timmermann, Journal of Banking and Finance, vol. 36, no. 11, 2012, p. 2974–2987.
- "Return Decomposition over the Business Cycle" , Journal of Banking and Finance, vol. 143, 2022, article 106592.
- "Time Variation in Cash Flows and Discount Rates" , with D. Ibrushi, Journal of Financial Econometrics, vol. 21, no. 5, 2023, p. 1557–1589.
For a complete list of publications and working papers, please see the Research page.