ZHAW International Week 2026 · Winterthur · 6 to 10 July

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Self-Driving Portfolios: AI Agents for Investment Research. Everything for the week, in one place.

ZHAW School of Management and Law5 days · 10 sessions · 219 slides8 teams of 4 · ~32 students
🔒 Instructor notes are encrypted inside every deck. Press N to unlock.

The Week: 10 session decks

click a card to open the deck
DAY 1 · AM

Trust I · The Hand-Built Backtest

Mystery dataset, backtest by hand, then the principles (lookahead, survivorship, overfitting).

22 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 1 · PM

Trust II · From Regression to Agents

The ML ladder: CAPM to trees, PCA, neural nets; LLMs and agents at altitude; week setup.

23 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 2 · AM

Capability I · Agentic Coding: Factors

Colab template, agent-written factor models on structured data, verify what the agent wrote.

22 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 2 · PM

Capability II · Sentiment + Golden Set

Typed JSON scorer on text, next-session signal, golden-set v1 self-run, local downloads start.

21 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 3 · AM

Reliability I · Model + Harness

Harness anatomy, loops, memory and RAG mechanics, orchestration, the router as live example.

24 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 3 · PM

Reliability II · Evals + Red Team

Evals on their own outputs, pass@k vs pass^k, reproducibility, guardrails, red-team swap.

23 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 4 · AM

Economics I · Local Models + Tokens

Local LLMs in Colab and on laptops, quantization, token economics, routing and cascades.

22 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 4 · PM

Economics II · Triangle + Freeze

Fine-tune vs prompt vs RAG, synthetic data, cutoff contamination + anchor reveal, bake-off, freeze.

22 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 5 · AM

Judgment I · Alpha, Beta, Attribution

Alpha vs operational beta, ablation and attribution, REAL-ALPHA verdicts, pitch runbook.

26 slidesOpen deck →
DAY 5 · PM

Judgment II · Live Holdout + Pitches

Holdout release, frozen-notebook live runs, team presentations, awards and close.

14 slidesOpen deck →