Looking for Online Quant Master degree with concentration on Quant / Algo / Stat Arb Trading

omrangassan

omrangassan

Joined
3/10/15
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Dear All

I'm Electrical Engineering Bachelor holder SINCE 2008 and following capital markets since 2004 ( FX / Futures / Commodities / Indices / Equities ) with good background about Market Analysis ( Technical / Fundamental / Sentiment ).

I'm not that Erudite thorough with the REAL QUANT , as I really can't differentiate between its different roles and required courses for each role.
All I know is that I want to study something concentrated on Algo / Quant / Stat Arb Trading : Something to enhance my understanding about building profitable trading strategies.

So ; I'm looking for ONLINE MASTER DEGREE that really concentrates on ALGO / QUANT / STAT ARB TRADING .. That have its name in the Job market.

Also : Is there any Quant Trading Courses / CERTIFICATES / TRAINGING you advice about ?

I'll be thankful to help me about this matter.
 
omrangassan said:
Dear All
So ; I'm looking for ONLINE MASTER DEGREE that really concentrates on ALGO / QUANT / STAT ARB TRADING .. That have its name in the Job market.
Click to expand...

There are very few reputable online programs. CMU MSCF and UW CFRM are the two that come to mind
 
hmm , CQF ? no i don't think it is related to quant trading / algo trading.
it don't have any time series or econometrics as i guess : correct me if am wrong.

i think that all the master degrees + cqf that i go thru are more related to quant modeling / risk management / product structuring / valuation .. but none is related to quant trading or algo trading : am i mistaken ? any more advice ?

can somebody talk from REAL EXPERIENCE not from the reviews / opinions he read thru websites ? we need real practical opinions please.
 
omrangassan said:
Dear All

All I know is that I want to study something concentrated on Algo / Quant / Stat Arb Trading : Something to enhance my understanding about building profitable trading strategies.

So ; I'm looking for ONLINE MASTER DEGREE that really concentrates on ALGO / QUANT / STAT ARB TRADING .. That have its name in the Job market.

Also : Is there any Quant Trading Courses / CERTIFICATES / TRAINGING you advice about ?
Click to expand...

You may be unhappy to learn that many of the people who teach computational finance have never actually tried to make money in the markets.

These professors would probably argue, with some justification, that they are there to provide you a foundation that you can use to do actual trading. But generally your professors are not going to teach you how to develop anything in the real world.

One exception is that this summer Brian Peterson, who is a quantitative portfolio manager, is going to be teaching a class in quantitative trading, using R. This is in the University of Washington Computational Finance and Risk Management program. The course can be taken on-line. Dr. Peterson is probably one of the top quantitative traders in the world. If I were not filling my non-working hours with a large software project, I would take this course.

At UW Guy Yollen also teaches an automated trading course.

At least in my experience one of the most important qualifications to doing quantitative trading is a very good software background. I have been developing software for decades and I find that this work challenges all of my skills.
 
Ian Kaplan said:
You may be unhappy to learn that many of the people who teach computational finance have never actually tried to make money in the markets.

These professors would probably argue, with some justification, that they are there to provide you a foundation that you can use to do actual trading. But generally your professors are not going to teach you how to develop anything in the real world.

One exception is that this summer Brian Peterson, who is a quantitative portfolio manager, is going to be teaching a class in quantitative trading, using R. This is in the University of Washington Computational Finance and Risk Management program. The course can be taken on-line. Dr. Peterson is probably one of the top quantitative traders in the world. If I were not filling my non-working hours with a large software project, I would take this course.

At UW Guy Yollen also teaches an automated trading course.

At least in my experience one of the most important qualifications to doing quantitative trading is a very good software background. I have been developing software for decades and I find that this work challenges all of my skills.
Click to expand...

Ok .. what is your work ? r u a quant ?
so you guess that UW may help about quant trading ?

is there any training for quant trading you ever hear about ? any other degrees ? certificates ? any advice ?

what kind of software background you mean for quant trading ( At least in my experience one of the most important qualifications to doing quantitative trading is a very good software background. ) ??
 
The better you are at developing well tested, reliable software, the better you will be at quant trading. Other than spending years writing software, I don't know how to get this experience.

This said, the background that you get in a computational finance masters program is an important foundation.

I'd also say that being able to write clearly is important. All of the R models I develop are developed using Knitr, which is a combination of LaTex and R. The end result is a paper, or at least a set of readable notes.
 
Ian Kaplan said:
At least in my experience one of the most important qualifications to doing quantitative trading is a very good software background. I have been developing software for decades and I find that this work challenges all of my skills.
Click to expand...
!!! I liked this
 
Ian Kaplan said:
The better you are at developing well tested, reliable software, the better you will be at quant trading. Other than spending years writing software, I don't know how to get this experience.

This said, the background that you get in a computational finance masters program is an important foundation.

I'd also say that being able to write clearly is important. All of the R models I develop are developed using Knitr, which is a combination of LaTex and R. The end result is a paper, or at least a set of readable notes.
Click to expand...

Can you please go into more details about what you said ? ( The better you are at developing well tested, reliable software, the better you will be at quant trading. ) : what kind of software development you mean ? what such development of software you are doing ?
thanx
 
Here's an edited version of a recent post on the LinkedIn UW Computational Finance and Risk Management discussion group:

My Masters project at UW (with Doug Martin) was on balance sheet factors that predict returns in the S&P 500 stock universe. I was working with the Compustat database, via UW's Warton subscription. All of my modeling work was done in R. This work can be found on this web page: http://www.bearcave.com/finance/thesis_project/index.html

I spent a couple of months working to build the data set (to avoid survivorship bias, among other things) and to clean up the data. At one point I was worried that I would end up giving my Master's presentation on data. But I finally got the data in shape to do the modeling and was able to get results. I worked on this for another couple of months afterward to get it into what I throught was a decent paper (which can be found on that link).

Although I have developed software for a long time, I found this work very challenging. There were times when I felt that all of my skills were being taxed.

I trade my own portfolio, on Interactive Brokers.

I build and trade quarterly (or at least 12-week) ETF models. All of my work is in Knitr and is public. I can be found here: http://www.bearcave.com/finance/etf2/index.html

Over the last year I have spent probably a couple of months of nights and weekends working on these models. I have a recently completed version, where the writing is better, that I have not gotten around to posting yet.

There was a bug in one of the models, resulting in some errors in the paper (which I didn't find until after it was submitted). A problem with the data. Fortunately this did not seem to cause a problem in the model I trade, but it did result in misleading results in two of the other models I reference in the ETF paper.

There is a lot of R code behind the experiments in the ETF paper. I find that working with numerical results, it is easy to make as mistake, even when I try to do a lot of analysis on the results.

In the portfolio work that I've been doing, I find this software a real challenge. And I have been writing software for a long time. In fact, these days, if I'm awake I'm generally writing software. I would not want to do work in computational finance without a deep software background. It is too easy to make a mistake and lose money. At least in my case, if I lose money, its my money. But for a fund, someone is trusting you with their money.

When I think of Knight Captial and what happened at Axa Rosenberg, I see some very expensive software errors.

I had classmates who came out of mathematics programs who didn't like to write software. And the software I saw that they did write reflected this. I do not see how these people will be successful, at least in general.

In my view one of the things that makes someone successful in software development is a respect for the craft. A desire to develop maintainable software (which is one reason I love Kniter - documentation and software). You don't necessarily need a computer science background. My undergrad degree is in Biology. But I think that you need to think of yourself as a software engineer, whether you're developing quant software or web applications.
 
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