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Research

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's ItôFormer Published Research Paper
01

ItôFormer: Augmenting Stochastic Validity in Financial-centric Deep Neural Networks

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6742840

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Tokenization and Transformer Architectures Published Research Paper
02

Tokenization and Transformer Architectures for Cross-Asset Allocation: Controlled Ablation in Financial Time Series

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934938

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Neural Portfolio Allocators Published Research Paper
03

Neural Portfolio Allocators: Cross-Asset Optimization Strategies with Attention-Based Transformers and Multi-Agents

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5447734

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics Published Research Paper
04

Modeling Nonlinear Pharmacokinetics: Clinical v. Anecdotal Data (LGD-4033) Why Dosage Is Not the Same as Exposure!

DOI: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934521

Cover of Nathaniel Coulter's Quantamental Portfolio Allocators Published Research Paper
05

Quantamental Portfolio Allocators: Deriving Alpha from Fundamental Metrics with ML

DOI: doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934778

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Research / Publication SSRN / ONLINE JOURNAL
View at SSRN Elsevier

Quantamental Portfolio Allocators: Deriving Alpha from Fundamental Metrics with Machine Learning

Abstract

"The consequences of failing to solve the great dilemma of risk won't just appear as abstract figures in the newspaper. They are all too real-people's savings wiped out, governments forced to tax or inflate their economies to death-human tragedy with real economic consequences. This is not my opinion. It is just simple math." — Mark Spitznagel, Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms (2021).

I think we've spent half a century demonizing volatility as "randomness" and, in doing so, invented modern finance rather than truly quantifying financial markets. Simplification has its place—mathematically, linear approximations often work beautifully—but in finance, I believe we went further: we denied our own reality.

I'm not here to argue whether markets are efficient or whether dividends and discounted cash flow models are the holy grail of valuation. I'm here to remind readers of the severity of the quote above. We can debate theory endlessly in a classroom, but when it comes to real people's capital—real lives—as fiduciaries, there is no excuse for negligence. There should also be no excuse for how we educate the next generation of finance students who, despite the industry's growing preference for the quantitatively adept, may one day find themselves responsible for someone else's financial future.

Long gone are the days of discretionary stock-picking on the buy-side. The modern fiduciary standard, regulatory environment, and sheer availability of data demand quantitative justification. But don't worry—this paper is not a critique of Modern Portfolio Theory, nor is it a treatise on non-zero quadratic variation, nonlinearity, or stochastic processes.

Rather, through the lens of a capstone project (shoutout Dr. Neumann), we have an opportunity to revisit some of the most fundamental questions in asset selection and portfolio construction. Augmented by both academic study and industry experience in computational finance, this paper serves as a brief but careful exploration of what it actually means to select equities responsibly in 2025.

Ironically, as you'll see, we often arrive at many of the same conclusions a classical analyst might reach. The difference is not necessarily what we choose, but how we arrive there: independently, quantitatively, and with every assumption exposed to scrutiny.

After all, investing was never about finding gold hidden beneath the surface. It was about learning how to search for it. The real treasure isn't the gold—it's the hunt.

Keywords

Quantamental Analysis, Machine Learning, Portfolio Optimization, Asset Allocation, Logistic Regression, Lightgbm, Arrow-Pratt Risk Aversion, CRRA Utility, Efficient Frontier, Utility-based Portfolio Construction, Cross-sectional Data, Time-Series, ARIMA, GARCH, Econometrics, Vector Autoregression, Kalman Filters, Multilayer Perceptron, Constant Relative Risk Aversion, Kelly Criterion, Black–Litterman, Bayesian Shrinkage, Total Return Swap, Mean Variance Optimization, Extreme Value Theory, Generalized Pareto Distribution, Tail Risk Hedging, Merton’s Mutual Fund Theorem, Bellman Optimality, Tree-structured Parzen Estimator, Expected Utility Maximization, Unconstrained MVO

JEL Classification

G11, G17, G32, C14, C15, C18, C38, C45, C53, C61, C63, G12, G14, G01

Suggested Citation

Coulter, Nathaniel, Quantamental Portfolio Allocators: Deriving Alpha from Fundamental Metrics with Machine Learning (November 11, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6934778 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6934778

Repository

github.com/Nathaniel-Coulter

Declaration of Interest

The author declares no competing financial interests, commercial affiliations, or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Ethics Approval

This study did not involve human subjects research, clinical interventions, patient recruitment, or access to protected health information. All clinical data were obtained from publicly available published literature, and anecdotal observations were derived from publicly available self-reported sources that were anonymized and analyzed in aggregate for educational and research purposes. Accordingly, institutional review board (IRB) approval was not required.

Funder Statement

This research received no external funding and was conducted independently by the author.

License Information

SSRN

The copyright holder has granted SSRN a license. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.

GitHub

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Nathaniel Coulter

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.