He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management (CFM), adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance at Imperial College London.
Graduating from École Normale Supérieure in 1985, he carried out his PhD at the Laboratory of Hertzian Spectroscopy, studying spin-polarized quantum gases with Claire Lhuillier.
[4] He now teaches a course From Statistical Mechanics to Social Sciences at École Normale Supérieure and, for a year, at Collège de France.
[5] His work covers the physics of disordered and glassy systems, granular materials, the statistics of price formation, stock market fluctuations and the modelling of financial risks.
He has repeatedly criticized the dogma of the efficient-market hypothesis and the methodology of economics and mathematical finance,[6] in particular the use of the Black–Scholes model which leads to a systematic underestimation of risk in options trading.