Study Career Advice

My sense is that finance as a profession is getting more and more technical, and these days some nominal exposure to a quantitative curriculum is likely to confer a career advantage, whatever you might think of doing. Mathematics is like a language (as is VBA), and those who speak it tend to appreciate the elegance and the fulfillment it brings.

Nowadays even risk management desks are hiring juniors with good quant skills. It wasn't always like that in the past so the professionalism is definitely on the way up. After Lehman collapsed, people started to realize the elusive hazard of correlation, the pitfalls of VAR, other risk holes and “Black Swans” everywhere. A lot of risk management and trading practices almost had to be reinvented as a result.

Of the two courses you mentioned, Financial Modelling is more quantitative than Derivative Trading. Financial Modelling would require at least a decent command of stochastic calculus, since it develops like a sequel from the core course Quantitative Methods in Finance.

The teacher for Modelling is a seasoned practitioner with two decades of field experience obtained in pre-eminent derivative houses. Like I said before, our program is constantly evolving and improving. In this connection, he did mention to me that as an improvement for this year, he would like the course to be less focused on quant, and more focused on the practical application of derivative products in solving client problems. Still, you cannot run a course in modelling without some mathematical and computational content, so I understand if this is not your cup of tea. The upside is that by the end of this course students should understand, to a good extent, how a lot of exotic derivatives are actually priced in practice. That sort of knowledge is always useful.

Derivative Trading is a course conducted by another practitioner,