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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...

Indeed, at times their math background is used to aid in 'educated hedging strategies', but at other times they are used to take huge directional bets. Not sure why you think quants are only used for hedging strategies... Again, agree on the fact that quants allow for market participants to...

finance definitely has its place in society (especially the traditional services like lending, investment banking etc), but in its current form (where most investment banks' revenues come from trading activities) i don't see how people can argue that they add any legitimate value. How can you...

comon, let's not kid ourselves. As much as people in finance (especially traders/quants) like to make the argument that they create liquidity or make the markets more efficient etc., we know deep down that with the current regime, this is simply not true. Most of the trading nowadays is the...

mm should it be >$20 because the expected value of the stock price is 20*exp(r), where r = mu - sigma^2/2. But r should be the risk free rate (we all know very well that it isn't in reality) and thus > 0

TraderJoe - how did you manage to go through the EB-1 category? (were you sponsored by a BB? HF? what degree did you have?).

Seeing that a lot of us on the forums are international students, I was wondering if anyone has been through the employement-based green card process? 1. How flexible are banks in willing to file you under the EB2 process vs EB3 after an MFE? (I know that it also depends on the requirement of...

I would respectively disagree in that there may be no difference from say, an investment bank's perspective, but if you are looking at non-finance areas there will definitely be a difference.

i would say MS Stats or Applied Math, given that you aren't 100% set on finance as a career. You can taylor many of the MS stats/applie math programs so it includes a healthy dose of financial engineering, but if you decide finance isn't the thing for you MS Stats/applied math would be more...

agree with andy - don't see anything wrong with putting it under courseworks section but putting the stanford name in the education section seems a bit disingenuous.

From my perspective, take it with a grain of salt: - Poor career service - Teaching quality is shoddy at best and highly variable (especially Professor Smirnov's introduction to mathematical finance class - don't even bother going to lecture as he won't actually teach anything. Far better off...

Yes it's an MA not an MS (the Columbia program has MA for some reason). Thanks for the response Andy - I think my main problem would be lack of programming skills, but I am hoping to remedy that by learning C++ (and R will be used extensively in my courses).

Little background - currently a risk analyst at a BB, attending school part-time for a Masters in statistics. I deliberately chose this over MFE programs because: - less stringent requirements - flexibility in course selection (I can take many quant finance classes) - more general education...

Any more thoughts/opinions? abcdefh; I want to do the program part-time so MBA would be less of an option (MBA takes longer)

O I should have clarified, I have 0 programming experience in MATLAB/C++/C#/JAVA/R etc (i.e. the quant languages). I do have programming experience in VBA, SQL, and I am pretty good at making macros, but I'm not sure how transferable Excel VBA skills are to the more 'robust' languages.

Just some background: Did an undergrad math / econ degree at a top10, currently working as an analyst in risk management at a large investment bank. Even though I have a math/econ background, my math classes were 'light' on quant finance stuff (no diff eq, no stochastic calculus, only 1 course...