What Tools, Applications used in MFE Program

[Prashant]

What are the tools, applications and operating systems are used throughout the MFE program?

Would appreciate any input from current students or professors.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

We use industry standard applications.
C++: Visual Studio
Excel, VBA for the structured finance course.
Latex: Miktex for taking notes (j/k on this front as I haven't seen anyone taking notes in latex yet. On the other hand, knowing tex syntax would help when you post mathematical formula on Quantnet)
Probably R,SAS on the Stat class.

In all, you probably sit in front of Visual Studio coding C++ for majority of your time.
That's been my experience in 2006-2007. Knowing Prof. Stefanica, you probably do more this year, not less of what I did.

 

[alain]

vi, vi and vi... :prayer: :prayer: vi

 

[Shlomi]

What about matlab?
Matlab is a very strong tool, any reason for not being used?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Nobody disputes that Matlab is not useful. In fact it's being used at other programs. Anything and everything is done in C++ at Baruch. It's a teaching philosophy that I don't think Baruch MFE management will change soon. You are encouraged to learn Matlab, or any tool you like but all the assignment must be done in C++.

 

[Shlomi]

Is matlab used at some wall street firms?
Is high programming level at matlab will be an advantage?

 

[alain]

some firms use Matlab to do prototyping but when it comes to production code to do real things, Matlab is not used that much.

 

[doug reich]

Latex: Miktex for taking notes (j/k on this front as I haven't seen anyone taking notes in latex yet. On the other hand, knowing tex syntax would help when you post mathematical formula on Quantnet)

Here is a LaTeX primer: Getting Started with LaTeX. Note that you can use Latex code in Math Mode (the dollar signs) on quantnet by putting [ tex ] and [ /tex ] around the code (press the TeX button above). You can skip ahead to the "Producing Mathematical Formulae using LaTeX" section for our purposes here.

 

[dstefan]

See also the How to use Latex on QuantNet thread from 2007:
How to use Latex on Quantnet - QuantNetwork - Financial Engineering Forum