We offer students opportunities to build practical professional skills that are relevant in the financial industry and are valued by employers.
QUMMIF is a student-managed investment fund with over £40,000 of assets. It provides postgraduate students with (i) work-relevant skills in investment, portfolio analysis, and trading as well as (ii) opportunities to network with fellow students, academics, and city professionals. Participants analyse companies, industries, and asset classes and develop practical investment and trading strategies. The work is done in teams which compete against each other to provide the best analysis. Academics and professionals from the financial industry act as mentors.
QUMMIF Team "Boondocks" consisting of Ramone Abbott-Jones (lead analyst), Chike Egbunike and Chidiebere Iwuanyanwu achieved remarkable success in the Worldwide Bloomberg Trading Challenge 2023. Competing against 2007 teams with 10,434 participants, the team ranked 53rd in the world and 11th in Europe."
Professional Development Modules are optional, short, non-credit-bearing modules. They typically run for a few weeks at various points during the year and focus on practical skills such as programming or working with trading software.
AmplifyME is a leading global provider of finance simulations in markets, banking, and technology.
Through unique simulation technology and their relationships with industry they:
AmplifyME's corporate institutional clients include: Citadel, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Millenium, Bank of America, Glencore, Citi, Evercore, Nomura & Jefferies.
As part of this module AmplifyME will run an intense programme of 4 simulation workshops on campus. The workshops are designed to connect candidates to the reality of working in today's financial industry, providing real-world experience.
The workshops cover two pathways, markets and banking. Candidates are progressed through sequentially more advanced experiences to help them get desk-ready.
As part of the Markets pathway candidates will experience AmplifyME's Sales and Trading simulations. Participants create prices for client block trades and then adjust their bid and offer to reflect their risk. The interaction between the buy-side and sell-side creates an exciting and competitive simulation event.
As part of the Banking pathway candidates will experience AmplifyME's Mergers and Acquisitions simulation where they will be taught from the ground up concepts from financial statements analysis to company valuation and preparing a pitch deck under time constraints!
The aim of this course is to discuss modern investment theory, its central concepts, and practical applications. The purpose is to show the application of finance theory in making portfolio management decisions, with some emphasis on individual portfolio decision-making.
Property investments and leverage in an individual portfolio will be examined. Alternative asset management strategies will be studied in detail including statistical arbitrage, pairs trading and merger arbitrage. Hedging tools and a detailed overview of the delta hedging of options will be covered. Finally, a description and overview of structured products, how they are created and valued, their typical end markets, and how investors win or lose in these investments.
Students will learn the fundamentals of C++ with applications from quantitative finance and algorithmic trading. The course does not assume any previous knowledge of C++. During the tutorials students will perform interest rate curve interpolation and algorithmic hedging of fixed income portfolio; they will also design simple booking algorithms in C++ including derivative trades, positions, risk, and delta-hedging. Students will also study how to implement counterparty credit risk estimation for simplest derivatives. The course also introduces students to the various aspects of Standard Library in C++ where the algorithms and data structures are implemented. Throughout the course, the sample questions from quant interviews and the solutions to them are presented.
FTP provides a working theoretical knowledge and a practical understanding of financial markets, trading strategies, risk and money management and trader analytics at the highest level.
The program offers a mix of classroom-based teaching, case study and practical trading exercises where students will trade on real-time simulated global markets through the use of industry-strength proprietary trading software (such as Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Eikon, X-Trader and others) in the School of Economics and Finance’s trading room.
MATLAB, a high-level language and interactive environment, is used for numerical computation, visualisation, and programming. The module will cover fundamental concepts such as data structures, function creation, and algorithm development. Emphasis will be placed on practical applications, allowing students to implement complex mathematical calculations and develop graphical user interfaces for data analysis.
The course will teach students VBA in Excel with applications to finance. The course does not assume any previous knowledge of coding or Excel. The course structure is:
Students provide free financial advice to local tech start-ups and entrepreneurs. The work is supervised by experienced professionals from leading organisations. Students provide advice on matters such as developing a business plan, data analysis, sources of funding, business structures, and marketing.