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Loïc Maréchal

Ph.D. in finance

Biography

I am a researcher at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne and the Cyber-Defence Campus (armasuisse, Science and Technology). In this position, I use financial methods to estimate the costs of cyberattacks and value cybersecurity firms to guide armasuisse's procurement decisions. I have been teaching finance at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Geneva, ESSEC Business School, and Les Roches. I have over 10 years of experience in commodity markets, which includes working on trading desks and writing my Ph.D. dissertation. I also have a strong interest in machine learning and market microstructure. I am a French and Swiss citizen living in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Interests

  • Financial markets
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Market microstructure
  • Information retrieval
  • Cybersecurity

Education

  • Ph.D. in finance, 2021

    University of Neuchâtel

  • M.Sc. in finance, 2009

    University of Paris X and Warsaw School of Economics

  • Maîtrise in management, 2007

    University of Versailles - Saint Quentin en Yvelines

  • B.Sc. in economics, 2006

    University of Versailles - Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Skills

R

90%

Java

80%

Statistics

80%

Finance

90%

Ski

100%

Kitesurfing

80%

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Researcher

University of Lausanne - Cyber-Defence Campus

Oct 2020 – Present Lausanne, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

Visiting lecturer

University of Geneva - ESSEC Business School - Les Roches

Sep 2020 – Apr 2023 Paris, Geneva, Crans-Montana
 
 
 
 
 

Scientific collaborator, teaching assistant and Ph.D. candidate

Neuchâtel University

Sep 2015 – Jul 2021 Neuchâtel, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

Senior commodity market analyst

Cargill

Jan 2014 – Jul 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

Commodity market analyst

S&P Global

Feb 2011 – Jul 2013 Lausanne, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

Algorithmic trading

Own Account

Jan 2010 – Jan 2020 Lausanne, Switzerland
 
 
 
 
 

Quantitative analyst (internship)

Bunge Mathematical Institute

Jun 2009 – Oct 2009 Warsaw, Poland

Projects

Cyber risk and the cross-section of stock returns (with D. Celeny)

We extract firms’ cyber risk with a machine learning algorithm measuring the proximity between their disclosures and a dedicated …

Empirical evidence from an event study on the determinants of cyberattack costs (with D. Celeny, E. Rousselot, A. Mermoud, and M. Humbert)

Along with the increasing frequency and severity of cyber incidents, understanding their economic implications is paramount. In this …

TechRank (with A. Mezzetti et al.)

This article introduces TechRank, a recursive algorithm based on a bipartite graph with weighted nodes that the authors developed to …

The new risk and return of venture capital investments (with F. Burguet and A. Mermoud)

n this paper, the authors estimate the risk and return of venture capital investments with selection bias correction. They use an …

The performance of cybersecurity investments (with D. Percia David, A. Mermoud, and M. Humbert)

Early-stage firms play a significant role in driving innovation and creating new products and services, especially for cybersecurity. …

Measuring security development in information technologies (with D. Percia David, W. Lacube, S. Gillard, T. Maillart, A. Mermoud, and M. Tsesmelis)

We study security-development patterns in computer-science technologies through (i) the security attention among technologies, (ii) the …

A tale of two premiums revisited

This paper investigates the effect of the “financialization” of commodity markets in terms of pricing. I explore whether …

Do economic variables forecast commodity futures volatility?

This paper explores empirically whether the supply or the demand uncertainty, the time to maturity, and the slope of the term structure …

The valuation effects of index investment in commodity futures (with M. Dubois)

This paper studies the valuation effect of the SP-GSCI roll on commodity contracts. We identify a surge of investment tracking …

Three essays on commodity markets

This dissertation is constituted of three distinct chapters on commodity markets, which cover different aspects of finance. The first …

Recent & Upcoming Talks

The 23rd Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

Cyber risk and the cross-section of stock returns - The determinants of cyberattack costs

The 22nd Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

Measuring the performance of investments in information security

Cyber Alp Retreat 2023

Cyber risk and the cross-section of stock returns

CICF Conference

A tale of two premiums revisited

Recent Posts

Inefficiency of markets with negative prices?

In this post, I briefly describe the event of negative prices market which occured on the NYMEX WTI crude oil May contract Event …

Multivariate break test

In this tutorial, I explain how to implement, in a flexible way, the algorithm of Bai, Lumsdaine, and Stock (1998). Step 1: Lag …

Security Exchange Commission: web browsing emulation and natural language processing

In this tutorial, I explain how to emulate navigation on the SEC website, perform bulk downloads of forms (e.g. 10-K forms) and extract …

Incremental efficient frontier

In this tutorial, I quickly describe how to compute and update an efficient frontier in adding stocks to an existing porfolio with R. …