Competencies of Graduate Certificate Students

Students who complete the Graduate Certificate Requirements will have a set of computational and methodology competencies. Computational competencies will include the following: (1) Familiarity with analytical finance software tools (such as S+FinMetrics for financial econometrics and NUOPT for portfolio optimization); (2) ability to develop financial analytics methods using interactive data analysis languages (such as S-PLUS, SIMPLE, Matlab) and modern object-oriented languages such as Java and C++); (3) Basic familiarity and use of portfolio optimization and risk management solutions (such as Barra and RiskMetrics); (4) Sources, extraction and management of complex financial data - sources include Chicago Research Center for Stock Prices (CRSP), Reuters, Bloomberg, COMPUSTAT, and types of data include stock prices and returns, futures, options, foreign exchange, low-frequency (daily, weekly and monthly) and high-frequency (intra-day data). Methodology competencies include: (1) Basic investment and financial econometrics concepts; (2) Modern statistical, computational and mathematical aspects of options and derivative products; (3) Numerical optimization methods as applied to portfolio construction, (4) Modern portfolio construction and risk management methods.