Additional modules

Support Modules

The School runs a number of MSc modules to support our students through their MSc, and practical classes specifically intended to give our students a head start in the world of finance. These include:

 

Semester A

  • Finance Trading Programme
  • Computational Finance (Visual Basic And Excel)
  • C++ For Finance

 

Semester B

 

Introduction to Electronic Trading

This course provides insight to how global exchanges are migrating from an open outcry to an electronic environment. The course will highlight:

  • History of the financial markets
  • Key concepts
  • Products (with a concentration on equity options in the US)
  • Overview of the players eg exchanges, firms, and clients
  • From the pits to the gateways
  • Operationally how markets work
  • Insights
  • Risk
  • Trading strategies ie the instructor will provide live examples of trading strategies and breakdown the particulars


Who should take this course?
If you are going to make financial services a career, and you want a brief course on electronic trading from the inside out or you want to sharpen your skills sets i.e., analyzing and acting fast under pressure (in front of your class mates) this is the course for you. The course is designed to challenge you so it will be made up of lectures, interactive simulations, and pop oral quizzes. There will be no books required, just your will to listen, learn, speak up in front of the class and try!

Instructor bio
gerry perez Gerald Perez has been in the financial markets for more than 23 years. He is a former professional institutional trader (in the US and Europe). He is a former project manager and compliance officer. Gerald formerly sat on the Futures Industry Association (FIA) European board. Currently sits on the Options Industry Council - European board and on the editorial board of the Futures Industry Association Magazine. Gerald periodically appears and speaks in exhibitions, periodicals, TV and Radio, on Bloomberg, CNBC Europe, NDTV and Sky News from Europe, the Middle East to India. He is a director at Interactive Brokers (IB). Interactive Brokers Group with an equity capital of $4.4 billion is a large independent online broker/dealer that operates offices worldwide. IB executes over one million trades per day.

 

Portfolio Management

The aim of this course is to discuss modern investment theory, its central concepts, and practical applications. The purpose is to show the application of finance theory in making portfolio management decisions, with some emphasis on individual portfolio decision-making. Property investments and leverage in an individual portfolio will be examined. Alternative asset management strategies will be studied in detail including statistical arbitrage, pairs trading and merger arbitrage. Hedging tools and a detailed overview of the delta hedging of options will be covered. Finally, a description and overview of structured products, how they are created, valued, their typical end markets and how investors win/lose in these investments.

 

Bloomberg Training Programme

The School hosts 10 Bloomberg trading terminals for exclusive use by our students. Bloomberg is one of the market leaders in providing business, economics and financial data to decision makers and the terminals give students access to the full Bloomberg set of financial and economics data.

In collaboration with Bloomberg, the School organises a number of training sessions throughout the academic year aimed at explaining the software’s functionalities, all students are welcome to attend at no additional cost.

 

C++ for Finance

The School organises an intensive two day module on C++ for Finance for all MSc students. The course introduced students to numerical methods in Finance implemented in C++, one of the most popular programming languages.

It covers a range of numerical methods in Finance, implemented in C++. The part starts from scratch and assumes no prior knowledge. It covers control structures, arrays,pointers etc. and goes all the way to object oriented programming.

The numerical methods part focuses on popular methods in Finance: Monte Carlo, trees and PDE grids.

The course is delivered by Ammar Kherraz, a well known practitioner in the finance industry. He said the following about the course:

"C++ for Finance provides a hands-on experience in C++ programming for implementing computational techniques of quantitative finance.

C++ is taught from scratch. Good practice in the use of C++ and key concepts around object orientation and memory management are taught. C++ is a very powerful programming language, widely used in the industry in writing quantitative modelling libraries e.g. for bank trading desks.

One key focus of this course is practicality and relevance to the industry. Selected pricing and risk management problems that are pertinent to today’s' practice of financial derivatives modelling are gone through. Areas that typically come in up quantitative interview questions are flagged up to the students."

 

City CV

City CV has been commissioned by QMUL School of Economics and Finance to provide a series of interview boot-camps plus individual mock interviews.

This dynamic workshop is designed and delivered by a former top tier investment bank Recruitment Manager, it also includes preparation for technical and knowledge-based questions that financial institutions regularly use. These approaches and other “tricks of the trade” make the programme an experience which reliably ensures that the performance of each candidate meets the exceptionally high expectations of top recruiters.

 

Matlab and R

The course is intended to give participants the basic tools for using quantitative financial econometrics methods with the software R. At the end, some Matlab implementations will also be studied. We will approach the following topics:

1) Introduction to R: basic commands
2) Loops and Conditional Statements in R
3) Reading and Writing Data with R
4) Econometrics in R
    4.1) Regression Analysis in R
    4.2) Linear Time Series in R
    4.3) Bootstrap
    4.4) Kernel Smoothing
    4.5) Garch Models
    4.6) Value at Risk
5) Matlab Basics
6) Matlab Implementations

 

Technical analysis

Practical application of technical analysis in the financial markets

Technical analysis evaluates past price performance to anticipate future price movements and is widely used by all major banks, brokers, fund managers and hedge funds. This course of lectures is aimed at giving students an understanding of how technical analysis is used to pick up trends and predict turning points in the financial markets. It will explain how different types of analysis can be applied to different markets. The lectures all work in the markets.

Week 1: Mapping the markets
- how cycle theory enables technical analysts to read equity markets

Lecturer: Deborah Owen, Chairperson of the Society of Technical Analysts and Managing Director of Investment Research of Cambridge, the first company in the UK to specialise in technical analysis. Deborah is co-author of ‘Mapping the Markets’ and ‘EMU in Perspective’.

Week 2: Pattern recognition
-    clear patterns of price behaviour occur more often than the laws of chance would allow. Identifying these patterns enables traders to pick up market turning points

Lecturer: George MacLean, Training Consultant, Linedata. George specialises in futures analysis and sovereign debt yield curve and spread analysis. He was formerly Director of European Technical Analysis at Standard & Poor’s MMS.

Week 3. Elliott Wave Analysis
-    harnessing the power of Elliott Wave analysis with the discipline of trend following.

Lecturer: Murray Gunn, Head of Technical Analysis, HSBC Bank. Murray is author of ‘Trading Regime Analysis’.

Week 4: Trend and momentum
- using trend and momentum to capture market moves. Incorporating short term indicators to these trends can determine whether they are oversold or overbought

Lecturer: George MacLean, Training Consultant, Linedata

Week 5: The power of technical analysis to predict collective behaviour in financial
             markets trading
- the importance of crowd behaviour and mental discipline to successful trading.

Lecturer: Tony Plummer, director of Helmsman Economics Ltd, a company that specialises in analysis of economic and financial market behaviour from a  historical perspective. Tony is the author of ‘Forecasting Financial Markets’.