When machine learning met China's stock market

In Hangzhou, Liang Wenfeng founded High-Flyer Quant — barely a dozen people at first. They began folding machine learning models into quantitative trading, building data pipelines and low-latency infrastructure from scratch. At the time, this combination was treated almost as heresy: Chinese quant finance still talked about multi-factor regressions. High-Flyer's AUM would later cross 100 billion yuan, but those profits didn't become luxury offices — they became the seed money for a GPU cluster. No one foresaw that compute and deep learning expertise accumulated to chase microsecond market opportunities would point toward something far more ambitious.