Finance Becomes Machine‑Learning Engineering

Financial economics is shifting from intuition‑based, marginalist models toward math‑heavy, 'theory‑less' machine‑learning systems that prioritize out‑of‑sample predictive performance over economic interpretation. Recent Journal of Financial Economics papers (Murray et al. 2024; Borri et al. 2024) show ML forecasts and nonlinear representations that reliably predict cross‑sectional returns and render many classical factors insignificant. — If finance is now engineered by ML rather than explained by economic theory, universities, regulators, and markets must rethink expertise, disclosure, model governance, and systemic‑risk oversight.