Online Course on Computational Investing

I’m drinking the online course koolaid

The emerging revolution in teaching

About a year ago a handful of AI and computer science professors at Stanford offered some of their classes online.

The response was staggering. Up to 100,000 students took some of the courses.  The result is two spinoff companies: coursera and udacity. These two companies are now partnering with universities and individual professors to offer free courses.

If you like this blog, you might like the course

You can check it out at coursera.org

Here’s an overview:

Why do the prices of some companies’ stocks seem to move up and down together while others move separately? What is High Frequency Trading? What does portfolio “diversification” really mean and how important is it? What should the price of a stock be? How can we discover and exploit the relationships between equity prices automatically?

We’ll examine these questions, and others, from a computational point of view. You will learn the principles and algorithms hedge funds and investment professionals use to maximize return and reduce risk in equity portfolios.

We start with a tour of the mathematics and statistics that underlie equity price changes, and the relationships between different groups of equities. We’ll review the most important economic theories of investing and how to create programs that take advantage of them. We’ll look at the data needed to do this, and how to manipulate it effectively.

keywords: coursera, education, online courses