Which course?

duko · Post by **duko** » Mon Sep 06, 2010 2:25 pm

Hi,

I’ve been trading on my own account for a couple of years and I’ve come to a stage where I’ve realized I will need quantitative skills to accelerate learning. I'm planning to leave my current job and enrol on a bachelor course, thus going full time.

My question is: which course would be more useful for systematic trading and strategy development? I can choose between engineering (electrical, mechanical, data) or mathematics and computational science. I guess it’s also a question of more practical or broad and theoretical education.

I say systematic trading because I don’t see myself working with exotic derivatives and I guess there are limitations as to what one can trade successfully on retail infrastructure.

Thanks in advance!

grabben · Post by **grabben** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 6:28 pm

Math + Computer Science. You don't need to know the laws of physics in order to trade profitably, but knowing how to model individual timeseries (and relations between many of them) and how to do some basic calculations on stochastic processes (or simulate them) will help a lot.

duko · Post by **duko** » Mon Sep 13, 2010 10:59 pm

My initial preference was for EE. Without knowing exactly what the various subjects' application to trading is, I thought EE would be more applied and the probability and stats courses would be useful in system development. A degree in maths on the other hand would be more suitable for modelling of derivatives for example.

Does it make any sense?

doctorwes · Post by **doctorwes** » Mon Sep 13, 2010 11:21 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=1

duko · Post by **duko** » Tue Sep 14, 2010 9:27 am

Very interesting, thank you! I think I get the idea.