FINAN 5530 - Python for Quantitative Finance

On the one hand, those seeking employment in the financial industry benefit from an embarrassment of riches in terms of the data available to them. On the other hand, significant quantitative and computational skills are required to profitably exploit these data. Thus, those graduates entering the market with an understanding of programming and how it is applied to analyze financial data do so with a competitive advantage. This course offers an introduction to programming for finance students without any previous programming knowledge. We use Python because it is one of the most powerful and in-demand languages in the financial industry, yet it has many features that make it an ideal first language for those new to computer programming. The goal of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the principles and techniques of Python programming for finance applications; students will come out of the course with the ability to read, understand, and write code in Python for their first day on the job.