2025 marked a year of reflection and recalibration for global markets. While inflationary pressures continued to ease and growth proved more resilient than many had anticipated, investors were increasingly confronted with deeper, more structural questions about return origination, the impact of climate transition, and the integration of technologies into investment processes. Surrounded by geopolitical uncertainty and evolving regulation, the focus shifted towards long-term efficiency, resilience, and insight.
Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence continued to influence portfolio construction, data analysis, and decision-making, but seminar discussions consistently emphasised implementability, causality, and economic intuition. As indexing, ETFs, and other investment vehicles continue to expand, discussions increasingly centered around portfolio choice in the presence of market impact, benchmarking effects, rebalancing frictions, and transaction costs.
Overall, 2025 showed that while investors have access to more data and more advanced tools than ever, turning that information into reliable insight remains difficult. Long-term success will depend on using innovation thoughtfully and recognising the real-world limits created by market impact.
2025 also marked our 35th anniversary, showcasing over three decades of commitment to fostering the practical application of advanced quantitative methods in investment management. We are incredibly proud to reach this milestone as we continue to bridge the gap between academia and industry, ensuring that cutting-edge research translates into actionable insights for investment professionals. Looking ahead, Marie Brière, Chair of the institute stated: “We aim to expand our member base to include a balanced mix of asset owners and asset managers, but also reach emerging players in the FinTech space. As the industry evolves, so too must our community, becoming more diverse, responsive, and future-oriented.
As we close this year we wish you and your loved ones a prosperous New Year.
Warm regards,
The Board of Inquire Europe
SPRING SEMINAR 2025
In March, we hosted the Spring Seminar 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. The agenda included very compelling presentations like the “The Statistical Limit of Arbitrage” by Dacheng Xiu exploring how even advanced machine-learning signals face a hard statistical ceiling because weak, noisy alphas and limited data greatly restrict the amount of arbitrage that can realistically be extracted.
Svetlana Bryzgalova delved into “Retail Investing in the Age of Big Data”, where she examined how the surge in retail trading, accelerated by zero-commission platforms and extensive data, is reshaping market dynamics while raising concerns about price-discovery distortions, risk-taking behavior, and the effects of payment-for-order-flow structures.
Another significant presentation was “Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier” by Theis Ingerslev Jensen showing how traditional machine-learning portfolio strategies often fail once trading costs and market impact are considered, proposing instead an implementable frontier that integrates these frictions and produces more realistic, tradable portfolios.
Access the presentations and papers here.
The prize for the best paper presented at the Joint Spring Seminar 2025 was awarded to Theis Ingerslev Jensen for his presentation entitled ”Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier” which focused on empirical asset pricing, with particular interest in novel data sets and subjective expectations, often using advanced statistical methods and machine learning.
Click here to read more.
AUTUMN SEMINAR 2025
Later in the year, at the autumn seminar in Utrecht the focus shifted to ETFs, Indexing and Market Impact. Some of the presentations included “The Unintended Consequences of Rebalancing” by Campbell R. Harvey, highlighting how routine, rule-based rebalancing by large institutional investors (such as threshold or calendar rebalancing) can unintentionally create predictable trading patterns that move markets, impose hidden costs, and even invite front-running by sophisticated traders.
The presentation “Shifting from Active to Passive: How Retirement Plans Impact Equity Prices” by Riccardo Sabbatucci examined the dramatic shift within U.S. 401(k) plans from active to passive investing and showed that growing passive ownership had materially influenced stock returns and prices, with higher retirement plan ownership linked to stronger performance for many equities.
“Passive Investing and the Rise of Mega-Firms” by Dimitri Vayanos developed a theoretical framework explaining how expanding passive flows favor the largest firms in an index, reshaping valuation dynamics, altering risk premia, and challenging traditional views of market efficiency as mega-caps disproportionately benefit from passive demand.
Access the program, presentations and papers here.
The award for the best paper presented at the Autumn Seminar 2025 went to Tiange Ye for his research “Passive Demand and Active Supply: Evidence from Maturity-mandated Corporate Bond Funds” where he explained that the rapid growth of passive investing in U.S. corporate bonds affects both market outcomes and firm behavior: when bonds become eligible for larger passive funds due to maturity cutoffs, yields fall and liquidity improves. These passive-demand shocks lower firms’ bond issuance costs, encourage greater reliance on bond financing over bank loans, and lead financially constrained firms in particular to increase investment.
Read the prize-winning paper here.
RESEARCH PROJECTS IN 2025
Research remains a cornerstone of Inquire Europe’s mission. We are proud to support academic projects in quantitative investing, with a focus on practical applications in institutional investing and asset management. Our commitment extends to fostering early-stage research that addresses European challenges and emphasizes the use of European data by researchers affiliated with European universities.
In 2025, under the leadership of our Research Committee led by Chairman Peter Oertmann and academic coordinator Magnus Dahlquist, we are delighted to announce the approval of eight new research projects for funding. Additionally, six previously funded projects were successfully completed this year.
Note: to access all the research and presentations from the seminar, please log in using your Inquire Europe account credentials.
LOOKING FORWARD TO 2026
Looking forward to 2026, we are anticipating our spring and autumn seminars and are very excited for what’s to come.
22 – 24 March 2026: Joint Spring seminar with Inquire UK. Organized by Inquire UK in Cambridge (the program will be available shortly)
27 – 29 September 2026: Autumn Seminar Inquire Europe in Prague, Czech Republic