Taught by Tushar Jaruhar
The evolution of computing power along with large amounts of data that is being collected has transformed the world of finance. An example of this is algorithmic trading where an algorithm uses trading data to determine when you should buy or sell a stock in the market. It becomes more interesting when the income tax department assess a lot of data about individual taxpayers and determines that some of the citizens are not paying enough in taxes. The third example is based on the idea of who should be given a credit card. Most people who have high savings qualify for a credit card but what about those people who have low to medium savings. What about students at Ashoka?
Many of these decisions in finance, such as selling a stock, obtaining a credit card, and identifying defaulters, are based on technology, mathematical algorithms, and knowledge of finance. A person who masters these 3 fields can work for large companies, set-up their own start-up, trade in the markets, pursue a career in research, become a financial consultant and pursue many more opportunities than what is mentioned here.
The course starts with a brief understanding of markets and data that we can obtain for these markets. Then we look at how to use this data to decide if we should buy or sell a stock or bond. After having evaluated it heuristically we try to explore algorithms that can fit the behaviour of the data and perhaps indicate the buy and sell decision.
Similarly, we apply this broad principle of identifying the data, examining it and then determining which model should be fitted to different problems in finance including predicting stock price, detecting fraud, providing credit, pricing options, sizing of companies based on financial attributes.
Companies worldwide are looking for talented people who can understand different parts of finance and apply the right tools and techniques to analyze the products, customers and services. Our goal is to provide students an opportunity to learn these skills and see challenging careers in finance globally.
It is oriented towards undergraduates who may not necessarily have coding skills. The audience is expected to have the willingness to learn and explore. The focus will be to help students create a portfolio of projects where they can demonstrate the application of data analytics.
