Econometrics, Financial derivatives (and more) online resources?

Thug
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Basically I'm offline tomorrow for a couple days, got a laptop and have the capacity to download around 3gb of stuff before I go.

I'm starting a MSc very soon and need to try and get myself up to scratch with some stuff before I get there!

Here is a small summary of some of the stuff. Is there any particular stuff people would recommend to learn or introduce myself to in the next few days? :)

Thanks

domos15.jpg
 
Khanacademy is a god send for any maths theory you might struggle with. Make sure you can remember how to differentiate, integrate, (including stuff like logarithmic functions), matrices may be useful (but depends on your particular degree), as may vectors (against dependent on the level of econometrics - some undergrad degrees wouldn't include it, some would, I'd expect a MSc from somewhere good would). Reasonably complex algebra would be useful, and top up on your greek alphabet (if you don't know them - you'll be using those symbols quite a bit!) Apart from that general statistical methods (particularly normal and t distributions and hypothesis testing). I suspect a lot of this might be foundations for your econometrics stuff.

Financial economics wise, I'd make sure you at least know vaguely about CAPM, and options (put and call). Other stuff to look at would be: the financial institutes and markets (s&p500 etc...), probability distributions, standard deviation, variance, co variance (and understand how these link into volatility) , different types of risk (and how you might go about diversifying it - or which you can), betas of stocks, binomial option pricing and black scholes. For something more fun and lighthearted, maybe look at stuff like the Monday effect and the momentum effect. (For reference I covered all of this in a single undergrad module)

As for finding sources of the knowledge, most of mine came from lecture notes or a variety of articles (normally from JSTOR - which is a pain to access without uni access)

(p.s. SAP is horrible, and SPSS will become the bane of your statistical life)

Good luck :)

kd
 
Coursera.....

for a good intro to Finance Columbia have a course on coursera:

older course - 10 weeks - you can prob still sign up now and look at all the lectures

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe

they're putting together a new course which hasn't started yet - they've now split it into two 7 week courses - though you're prob on your MSc by then...

part 1 of the newer course

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe1

part 2 starts next year:

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe2

(you're probably better off signing up for the old course at this point (assuming you still can) if you need to study this asap...)

there was also a computing for data analysis course on there using R - it will run again in Sept (you can't access the old course any more)

https://www.coursera.org/course/compdata

however the lectures are available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjTlxb-wKvXNSDfcKPFH2gzHGyjpeCZmJ

tis only a basic intro - recommended you download the art of R programming too and also take a look at this course:

Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics (also uses R)

https://www.coursera.org/course/compfinance

Lastly - will throw this in - though its not directly relevant to finance, if you've got some maths background it is a useful course which is very applicable to finance - covers time series analysis, filtering, PCA etc...

https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods

(tis a bit more maths heavy than the others so might not be suitable for you depending on your background)
 
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Khanacademy is a god send for any maths theory you might struggle with. Make sure you can remember how to differentiate, integrate, (including stuff like logarithmic functions), matrices may be useful (but depends on your particular degree), as may vectors (against dependent on the level of econometrics - some undergrad degrees wouldn't include it, some would, I'd expect a MSc would). Reasonably complex algebra would be useful, and top up on your greek alphabet (if you don't know them - you'll be using those symbols quite a bit!) Apart from that general statistical methods (particularly normal and t distributions and hypothesis testing). I suspect a lot of this might be foundations for your econometrics stuff.

Financial economics wise, I'd make sure you at least know vaguely about CAPM, and options (put and call). Other stuff to look at would be: the financial institutes and markets (s&p500 etc...), probability distributions, standard deviation, variance, co variance (and understand how these link into volatility) , different types of risk (and how you might go about diversifying it - or which you can), betas of stocks, binomial option pricing and black scholes. For something more fun and lighthearted, maybe look at stuff like the Monday effect and the momentum effect. (For reference I covered all of this in a single undergrad module)

As for finding sources of the knowledge, most of mine came from lecture notes or a variety of articles (normally from JSTOR - which is a pain to access without uni access)

(p.s. SAP is horrible, and SPSS will become the bane of your statistical life)

Good luck :)

kd

Thank you very much KD, that's an excellent summary of the stuff I need to know. As suspected, I'm completely and utterly out of my depth, as GCSE maths was my last port of call and that was a looooooooong time ago.

Would you recommend any books in particular to work from? That Khanacademy stuff looks brilliant (how did I never know this existed!), but I won't have proper internet for a bit and would love to try and get up to scratch on this stuff in the week or two that I have. I reckon that I'll need to start learning some more basic stuff first?

If it helps heres a bit more info:

aPs9x96.png




Coursera.....

for a good intro to Finance Columbia have a course on coursera:

older course - 10 weeks - you can prob still sign up now and look at all the lectures

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe

they're putting together a new course which hasn't started yet - they've now split it into two 7 week courses - though you're prob on your MSc by then...

part 1 of the newer course

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe1

part 2 starts next year:

https://www.coursera.org/course/fe2

(you're probably better off signing up for the old course at this point (assuming you still can) if you need to study this asap...)

there was also a computing for data analysis course on there using R - it will run again in Sept (you can't access the old course any more)

https://www.coursera.org/course/compdata

however the lectures are available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjTlxb-wKvXNSDfcKPFH2gzHGyjpeCZmJ

tis only a basic intro - recommended you download the art of R programming too and also take a look at this course:

Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics (also uses R)

https://www.coursera.org/course/compfinance

Lastly - will throw this in - though its not directly relevant to finance, if you've got some maths background it is a useful course which is very applicable to finance - covers time series analysis, filtering, PCA etc...

https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods

(tis a bit more maths heavy than the others so might not be suitable for you depending on your background)

Thank you for taking the time to post those links, a lovely collection indeed. Will try and stream/buffer them now so I can access them over the next day when I won't have internet.

Are there any particular theories/concepts/prior learning that you think I should focus on?

Thanks again!
 
Thank you for taking the time to post those links, a lovely collection indeed. Will try and stream/buffer them now so I can access them over the next day when I won't have internet.

Are there any particular theories/concepts/prior learning that you think I should focus on?

since you've mentioned that GCSE maths was your last port of call I'd be inclined to brush up on that first as per KD's post

you might also check out www.udacity.com for some more maths revision

I reckon the previous Columbia course on coursera that I linked to first ought to give you a good intro to Finance

this book is also pretty good:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paul-Wilmott-Introduces-Quantitative-Finance/dp/0470319585

tis fairly accessible - a gentler into than the Hull book

What sort of course is it btw... sounds like a mix between a Finance degree and some sort of 'Information systems' type course?
 
Id also read the series of finance industry interviews in the Guardian. There's around 70 of them and each is an account in plain English of what different roles there are in the financial industry - pretty informative.

Also, I've always thought econometrics was the mathematical equivalent of turd polishing !
 
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