Hey, I’m Matt. I’m a former Bloomberg News reporter, and you’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI. Every Thursday, I cover the week’s biggest AI-in-finance stories, plus original reporting and analysis.
JPMorgan Starts AI Market Lab for Trading
JPMorgan is hiring researchers for a new AI Market Lab within its Quantitative Trading & Research group to build foundation models and agentic systems for systematic trading, market making and electronic markets.
JPMorgan’s head of AI for electronic markets, Xi Chen, said in a LinkedIn post that the new lab will focus on high- to mid-frequency trading across asset classes.
Job openings include an AI scientist, a quantitative developer and a high-frequency trading and market microstructure expert. The AI scientist role calls for transformer-based and time-series foundation models built from scratch using market data, order books, transactions, alternative data and information spanning multiple asset classes.
Training a transformer based model on financial data is a topic we’ve covered a lot. (See here, here and here.) JPM has already researched foundation models for market data. TradeFM, disclosed by JPMorgan researchers this year, is a 524-million-parameter transformer trained on 10.7 billion tokens from more than 9,000 U.S. equities. It predicts the timing, size, price depth and direction of the next market event.
TL;DR
JPMorgan’s decision to start an AI Market Lab reminded me of a prediction by Atlas Wang, who leads XTX Markets’ New York AI lab. Within two or three years, he wrote, every serious trading firm will either have a real AI/ML lab or “look structurally behind.” JPMorgan’s move looks like a step in that direction.
NOTE FROM OUR SPONSOR
Turn Charts and Narrative into Timing, Risk and Valuation
OpenAI and Anthropic Push Deeper Into Financial Workflows
On Sept. 10, OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a product aimed initially at investment bankers and equity researchers. Developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore, it bundles OpenAI’s models with licensed financial data and tools for producing valuation models, research notes and pitchbooks.
Four days later, Anthropic, which announced Claude for Financial Services back in July 2025, announced Claude for Financial Advisors, a wealth-management tool that draws on client data across advisers’ custody, portfolio and CRM systems.
Both are also competing with specialist finance AI platforms such as Rogo and Model ML, which already combine financial data, firm knowledge and models inside analyst workflows.
All of them are racing to become the operating system for finance—the place where financial professionals access data, run analysis and produce work.
Bridgewater CIO: AI Is a “Couple Years” From Beating Human Investors
Greg Jensen, managing CIO of Bridgewater, has been following AI well before the current ChatGPT-led boom. In fact, he wrote the first outside check to Anthropic. So this exchange does not make me feel good:
Asked whether he takes the risk of human extinction seriously, Jensen responded: “Yeah, very seriously.”
“If you believe we can create an intelligence that’s smarter than us that’ll pursue its own goals, the rest follows just logically,” Jensen said on the Odd Lots podcast. “Why do you think you’ll be able to control it?”
I’m hoping Jensen is wrong and that, you know, we’re not all going to die because of AI. So I’m going to avoid the will-AI-kill-us-all question. (If you’re looking for a less fatalistic view, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman argues that AI systems remain tools, however capable, and are “designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans.”)
What I think is more (financially) interesting are Jensen’s comments about the state of AI at the $102 billion hedge fund.
Jensen said the AI is already “winning in markets at about a similar rate as Pure Alpha in totally different ways.”
“I think we are a couple years from it being significantly better than the group of all humans at Bridgewater,” he said. “We’ll see. That’s a bit of a forecast, but that’s how fast it’s coming.”
This is a pretty remarkable statement from the managing CIO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds. This would have been science fiction just a few years ago.
TL;DR
Bridgewater’s AI is already winning in markets at about the same rate as Pure Alpha, and Jensen thinks it could outperform the firm’s human investors within a couple of years. Hopefully, it stops there.
For more on Bridgewater’s AI efforts:
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
Advisor Headcount Set to Grow as AI Expands Capacity | Cerulli Associates
JPMorgan rolls out Claude changes: $2,000 spending limits and extra security | Business Insider
Nonbank traders make Wall Street’s old guard up their game | IFR
Balyasny’s new AI fellowship program could get you a job on a trading desk | eFinancialCareers
A.I. Could Possibly End Humanity. How Are Humans Supposed to Process That? | NYT
Institutional Access Increases in Prediction Markets | Markets Media
MEETUP
AI Agents in London, Fintech Founders in Frankfurt
AI Street is sponsoring two upcoming events in London and Frankfurt organized by Fayssal El Mofatiche, co-author of Building AI Agents for Finance and a former senior investment engineer at Allianz. I’m happy to support events growing the AI & finance community! I hope some AI Street readers can join.
AI Agents for Alpha Generation — From Prompt to P&L
Fayssal and Flowistic are partnering with Zerve for an event at Deutsche Bank in London.
Deutsche Bank, London
Oct. 7, 17:30 CET
Registration is being finalized. Join the update list on the event page.
FinTech Founder & Investor Evening
Founders, investors and others from Frankfurt’s fintech ecosystem will gather at Schalast.
Schalast, Frankfurt
Nov. 4, 17:00 CET
Registration is open on the event page.
ADOPTION
Bigger Funds Use More AI, Mostly for Efficiency: Neudata
Neudata surveyed 69 data buyers and 122 data providers between June and August 2026.
AI is improving efficiency more than investment performance: Fifty-six percent of buyers reported a measurable return from AI. Forty-one percent cited efficiency gains, compared with 19% for cost savings and 17% for investment performance.
MCP is usually included: Of the 54 providers offering MCP access, 52% charged no additional fee. Most treat it as another way to deliver data, rather than a separate product.
Larger funds are doing more with AI: Firms managing more than $1 billion averaged 2.3 AI initiatives, compared with 1.7 at smaller firms. Most of the difference came from routine tasks and chatbots, not in-house model development.
The takeaway: Bigger funds are using AI more, but the gains are still coming mainly from efficiency, not alpha. See the full report here.
This Week in AI Street
Balyasny’s AI Beat Market Odds on Merger Deals
Balyasny says its fine-tuned GPT-4o model produced more accurate probabilities than a market-implied benchmark and a conventional machine-learning model in a held-out backtest.
The $38 billion hedge fund has deployed the model as a decision-support tool for analysts and portfolio managers, according to a July research paper.
CALENDAR
Upcoming AI + Finance Conferences
AI-Native Banking & Fintech Conference – September 29 • Salt Lake City
Banking and fintech conference centered on agentic AI, with speakers from banks, fintechs and regulators discussing production use cases, risk, compliance and operations.
22nd Quantitative Finance Conference — September 30–October 2 • Malta
Practitioner and academic conference with tracks on AI, LLMs and machine learning, alongside volatility, derivatives, risk modelling and systematic trading.AI Agents for Alpha Generation — From Prompt to P&L — October 7 • London
Finteda and Zerve event at Deutsche Bank examining how AI agents move from prompts into production investment workflows and measurable alpha generation.ALGODEFI 26 — October 8–9 • Milan
Politecnico di Milano workshop exploring algorithmic trading, decentralized finance and artificial intelligence in capital markets.World Financial Information Conference — October 11–14 • Copenhagen
Market-data conference examining AI adoption, data licensing and governance, alternative data, cloud trading infrastructure and the changing financial-information industry.AI Engineer New York 2026 — October 12–14 • New York
Three-day conference for engineers and technical leaders building production AI across banking, hedge funds, fintech, insurance and asset management.AI in Finance Summit Fall — October 21–22 • Hoboken, NJ
Financial-services AI summit covering agentic systems, governance, fraud, forecasting, trading, data infrastructure and the challenges of scaling AI into production.Evident AI Symposium — October 22 • New York
Curated gathering of senior banking executives, AI leaders and policymakers focused on turning financial institutions into AI-first organizations.Open Source in Finance Forum New York — November 4–5 • New York
FINOS conference for financial-services technologists featuring keynotes, panels and technical sessions on open-source infrastructure and collaboration.FinTech Founder & Investor Evening — November 4 • Frankfurt
Invitation-only evening hosted by Finteda, Schalast and Fincite, bringing together founders and investors to discuss capital, regulation and scaling fintech companies in Europe.
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