Review by

Sravan Patchala. Feel free to contact him at sravps7@gmail.com

Review

This is one of the most unique courses offered by the department. If you are looking to venture into the field of Finance, then this might be a good tool to have in your tool-box. The course does not assume any previous “finance” knowledge, but does require a lot of mathematical aptitude. Also having a good background in probability would be really helpful towards the end of this course, without which doing this course might be a struggle, particularly towards the end.

The course content (and thus the lectures) closely follows the reference book prescribed by the instructor. Topics like portfolio management, arbitrage, hedging, pricing of Options and Contracts are covered in the course. Most of the topics involve simple but important proofs which are tested during the exams. Concepts like Stochastic Calculus might be touched upon, if time permits.

The time allotted for each topic decreases as the course progresses, notwithstanding the increase in the difficulty of the topics. So it wouldn’t hurt to attend lectures or do some reading on your own from the reference book. The difficulty of exams typically increases over quiz 1, Midsem, quiz 2 and the Endsem, but that can be attributed to increase of difficulty in the tested topics.

On the whole, if you are thinking that doing this course will make you one of the best in the business, you are mistaken. It just makes you comfortable with some of the relevant literature. Also, it should build a decent foundation if you want to pursue something in that direction. But everything comes at a price – Getting a good grade would require a sunstantial investment of time towards this course.