Question regarding Machine Learning as applied to financial markets

Hey everyone -

So I apologize if this is rather vague, I'm trying to test the waters with this post. I'm currently a student that conducts research on mine detection, but I cannot publicly present any research.

This becomes a problem once I have course projects, whereby I cannot do anything with my research when nearly everyone else does have that benefit. As a result, I'm trying to think of project ideas and am considering the application of something like SVM for stock market predictions.

I've searched IEEE Xplore for papers regarding financial predictions and things like SVM, but don't get a ton of results. I'm not sure if this is because financial algorithms are kept private for a reason or because it's not an attractive combination.

So, really, I'm just wondering if there are any recommendations for machine learning and financial market prediction/analysis that people could suggest. I'm coming up short here.

Thanks!

edit: I'm pretty new to Machine Learning so that also accounts for this question to more educated individuals