u/EmbarrassedJudge7401

Hi! I’m coming to KU Leuven for a workshop in September and applied for a room at the KU Leuven Guesthouse for my 5-day stay, but I haven’t received the room confirmation yet.

I need the confirmation for my Belgian visa appointment. If I don’t receive it by 10 AM CEST on August 17, I’ll lose my visa appointment, and I’m currently unable to reschedule it.

Has anyone dealt with this before or knows who I could contact to get the Guesthouse booking confirmed in time? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I've already mailed guesthousing@kuleuven.be, tried calling them too but I think theyre off on the weekend?

I'm currently working at a small software company that's exploring systematic trading. I'm under NDA, so I can't discuss the specific project, but I've been given a surprising amount of freedom and responsibility in building and validating trading hypotheses, with relatively little senior guidance.

My background is fairly mathematical (stochastic calculus, optimization, probability, machine learning, options), so I don't feel completely out of my depth technically. My challenge is that I'm essentially the only person driving the research side, so I don't have an experienced quant to learn from or sanity-check my approach.

I've been reading papers and books and trying to reproduce ideas, but I often spend days implementing something only to discover why it doesn't work. It's educational, but I worry that I'm repeatedly rediscovering dead ends instead of being useful or learning how experienced researchers decide what's worth investigating in the first place.

ofcourse, I'm not looking for alpha ideas or anyone's proprietary strategies. What I'd really appreciate is advice on developing a disciplined research process.

Some questions I'm struggling with:

• How do you generate research hypotheses beyond existing literature?
• How do you decide whether an idea is worth implementing before investing days or weeks into it?
• What does your end-to-end research workflow look like (idea to data to testing to validation to iterate/discard)?
• How do you avoid spending all your time rediscovering ideas that have already been disproven?
• How do you discover and evaluate useful datasets beyond the obvious market data feeds?

I'm fortunate to have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on, which is exciting but also means I have very little structure. My biggest bottleneck isn't mathematics or programming, it's understanding how experienced quant researchers actually approach research.

I'd really appreciate any books, papers, blogs, talks, or general advice on building a rigorous research methodology.