Session 1

Introduction to COMM 420

Welcome to COMM 420: Financial Markets and Innovation! Please review the course outline and fill out the appropriate pre-course survey.

This course is designed to present students with an alternate lens on finance, particularly financial markets, trading and investing, by extending the theoretical models and lessons of classical finance. This course will provide a fresh view on what may change and what may not. The class will revisit classic economic theories, how they may be changing, and potentially new economic theories and results. Innovations in trading including, high frequency and algorithmic trading, automated markets, and market speed bumps will be examined from a market welfare perspective. How automation affects the investment and portfolio management process and business will also be discussed.

The course will be delivered in a novel fashion with a combination of recorded lecture snippets, live tutorials, readings, presentations, and activities that will require the active participation of students. The course will depend heavily on active group participation and a desire to think outside of the box. Programming skills are not required but an openness to acquire these skills is a prerequisite. At the end of the course students will have knowledge of how technology supported innovation in financial services is changing financial intermediation. Students may also have an idea and a prototype for a FinTech start-up of their own. This is encouraged but is certainly not the only goal of the course.

In this course, you will:

  1. Analyze ways in which technology is re-shaping how assets are traded.
  2. Recommend how machine learning and data science can be applied to solving financial trading problems.
  3. Design a strategy to evaluate the quality of electronic markets.
  4. Assess the importance of intermediaries, investors, regulators, and market operators in the functioning of digital capital markets.

Recommended material

Subscription to the Wall Street Journal and/or the Financial Times. Some other excellent financial magazines such as The Economist and Business Week also provide good applications of what you will learn in the class.

Course Website

The course website provides valuable information related to the course. On the website you will find:

  • Smith Living Cases
  • Readings
  • Video Snippets
  • Academic articles
  • Posted articles from financial press, as may arise in class

Additional Content

.js-id-session1