About

Who I am, and why I’m working through quantitative finance from first principles.

I’m David Maguire. I work in data and analytics in banking, and in my own time I’ve become increasingly absorbed by quantitative finance — markets as a problem in statistics and machine learning. This site is my open notebook for working through that interest properly: the mathematics, the models, and the experiments, from first principles.

What draws me in is the honesty the subject demands. Financial data is mostly noise, so the real question is never “does this work on the backtest?” but “would it survive out-of-sample, on data it has never seen?” I’m less interested in clever strategies than in understanding why something works or fails — the assumptions underneath a model, and where they break down.

So I’m learning it from the ground up: re-deriving the equations, re-implementing the models, and testing ideas honestly rather than taking results on faith. I’m also studying the field formally, through an MSc in Financial Services and a Professional Diploma in AI Models and Programming in Financial Services.

The direction I’m most curious about is where AI meets markets — how large language models and agents might support decision-making, provided they can be made transparent and kept under proper control.

How this site was built

I build this site with AI assistance — for writing code, generating figures, and drafting prose — working from my own research questions, design choices, and interpretation. That does not lower the bar each entry has to clear: every number is computed and checked in code before it goes up, every model is one I can derive and defend from first principles, and the judgement throughout — what to test, what it means, and what to conclude — is mine. I use these tools deliberately and say so openly; they help me build faster, but they do not stand in for the understanding this site exists to demonstrate.

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