In the Spring semester, students enroll in a 3-credit hour course in Financial Modeling & Testing that integrates and builds upon what they have learned across their courses in finance, data science, and R/Python programming. Once again, the course is team-taught by subject specialists, this time drawn from both the Finance Dept. and the IROM Dept.
Students develop their skills in gathering data from a variety of sources: including both traditional structured types (e.g., corporate filings and financial statements, stock price and return data, economic indicators) and alternative unstructured types (e.g., corporate investor conference calls, internet message boards and sentiment data, imagery data). Students are exposed to a variety of databases (e.g., Compustat, CRSP, SEC, Bloomberg, and Factset) and state-of-the-art techniques and procedures for synthesizing and analyzing the data—ultimately building financial models to produce actionable insights.
Throughout the semester, student-teams present their ongoing research, work, and findings to the rest of the class and the faculty.