Recent content by DMX

word of advice to aspiring courserians - stick to a few courses per semester instead of enrolling in every course you find interesting. many of these courses require (and rightfully so) extreme dedication, so if you are working full time I wouldn't recommend more than 2 courses a semester. for...

this is fantastic news - im taking a course on neural networks/probabilistic graphical models at coursera, and the quality of teaching is very very high.

Columbia has good machine learning courses but they are not part of the "official" curriculum (nonetheless you will find many MFE students in the class and you will have the opportunity to work on projects that utilize machine learning techniques in finance context). I would be very surprised...

whoa, are you saying you got 790 on a sample Math GRE for the subject GRE? Or do you mean for the math portion of the regular GRE? If the former, then that is insanely good and combined with a few community college courses, should make you competitive at most MFE programs (PhD programs even)...

I know many MFE candidates are busy with stochastic calculus, PDE etc. for learning the theory of quant finance, but can I please advise MFEs to take a few data mining/machine learning courses within the stats/comp sci department? Few observations: 1) Not everyone can get that front office...

do Stats. If you end up choosing Econ, make sure that at least some of the classes you take require programming assignments (you don't necessarily need C++, but SQL, R, SAS etc should definitely be learned). Like many others have suggested, take regression/times series at least. I was a Econ...

1. do you want to a super quant education or a more general finance education peppered with quant classes (CMU for the former, Princeton for the latter) 2. how much is the cost difference? will you go into debt? unless you can save 60K+ by going to CMU I would do Princeton. Like most people...

1. ive been thinking about these kinds of mdoels for a while (not just for MFE but for college/law school etc). there is definitely existing literature on this though. 2. linear regression doesn't make sense. use a logistic regression for these types of models. 3. ditch excel. use R (free...

in that case i would advise to go to Cornell. no amount of education will replace work experience.

do you want to work in the US or Europe? if not sure, do the phd. pros - save money (assuming your phd is funded) - opens more doors (academia, consulting) cons - 4~6 years instead of 1~2 years for MFE. but i think it will be well worth it

Knowing many people from both Cornell/Columbia MFE programs, I have to say that the calibres of students from the Columbia MFE program have been higher (based on my observations of course, so take it with a grain of salt). However, I agree with Andy - having real-world experience will set you...

Another issue I have with risk is the 'risk-management-via-limits' framework. For example, there may be some heavy quant work involved to get the VaR numbers for (say) an exotics desk, and most of this is monitored through VaR/Greeks/stress-test limits. But there is no rigor in setting such...

Agreed (I actually used to work in Risk for your bank and I remember that virtually every other meeting was to discuss/respond to some new Fed request. Somewhat of a hyperbole, but not TOO far from the truth). I guess my rebuttal would be, how much of your MFE degree would be utilized in these...

I know there are numerous topics regarding oversupply of MFE grads in the current market, but what are people’s thoughts of quant finance going forward? My observations: - Most MFEs enter into the program to go into quant trading / quant research - Trading jobs are shrinking...

Agreed. Many thanks to Prof Stefanica for his contributions and transparency. It's a real shame that people will fork over almost double Baruch's tution to attend a program that is attached to a more prestigious university (Columbia MAFN comes to mind... I was unfortunate enough to take a...