Nicolas Chapados holds a BEng from McGill University and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Montréal. While still writing his thesis and jointly with his advisor Yoshua Bengio, he co-founded ApSTAT Technologies in 2001, a machine learning technology transfer firm, to apply cutting-edge academic research ideas to areas such as business forecasting, supply chain planning and portfolio management. During a fruitful collaboration with Desjardins Global Asset Management (2003–08), he led the R&D of commodity forecasting and trading models. In 2012, he and Eric-Paul Couture decided to spin-off Chapados Couture Capital to enable the commercialization of portfolio management strategies relying on advanced quantitative models.

Previously, Nicolas has been a researcher within the speech recognition research group at Nortel Networks (1994–99), where he led the research and implementation of a natural-language dialog manager for speech recognition applications. He is a CFA charterholder.

Eric-Paul Couture co-founded Quantitative Capital, division of AMI Partners Inc. (now TD Quantitative Capital) in 1992 with Carl H. Otto, a pioneering canadian-based investment management firm specializing in semi-active risk-controlled canadian equity portfolio strategies. He served as managing partner and portfolio manager for 4 years during which assets under management grew from $250 million to $5 billion. As Chief Research Officer and portfolio manager at Barclays Global Investors Canada, he then contributed to the development, validation and roll-out of BGI’s Canada Alpha Tilt institutional product which delivered a realized Information Ratio of 1.0 for assets under management in the $300 million range.

Mr. Couture has 27 years experience in the investment management industry. He holds a Bachelor in Finance from McGill University, a Masters in Mineral Economics from the Colorado School of Mines and is currently completing a Masters in Statistics at McGill University.