Curriculum

Our eight-week Corporate Financial Strategy online-learning course focuses on how to evaluate levels of risk, rates of return on corporate investments, and resource allocations. This course gives you the opportunity to work through real-world case studies of organizational strategy and evaluate those that worked, those that did not, and why.

You Will Learn To:

• Develop a strategic short-term plan for your organization and optimize capital management
• Gain knowledge of long-term financing and valuing equities, capital cost, and structure
• Recognize the time value of money, risk, and reward
• Understand the decision-making process for raising and allocating capital

After Completing the Course, You Will Be Able To:

Understand an organization’s four principal activities:

1. Conducting operations
2. Establishing goals and strategies
3. Making investments
4. Obtaining financing

Understand the purpose and content of the three principal financial statements that organizations prepare to measure and report on the results of their business transactions:

1. Balance sheet statement
2. Cash flow statement
3. Income statement

Examine mergers and acquisitions, financial decision-making, debt, and corporate restructuring in a global context.

Stand-alone Option

This course may be taken outside of the certificate. 

Our eight-week Machine Learning for Finance course focuses on collecting, organizing, and using data to perform advanced financial analysis with algorithms and statistical techniques and tools. During the course, you will have an opportunity to work through real-life case studies and examples giving you an opportunity to practically apply the theory you will be taught to financial models.

You Will Learn To:

• Review statistics and probability, and to apply basic concepts of statistics to finance.
• Understand what linear regression is and when to use it, as well as how to apply linear regression metrics to a model.
• Make models more rigorous by adding things like train/test split and cross-validation.
• Backtest a model and understand why this is particularly important for finance.
• Use simulation to solve a portfolio allocation problem.
• Converse at a high level about several advanced topics in financial machine learning.

You Will Be Able To:

• Understand and review statistics and probability.
• Perform Exploratory Data Analysis in Python/Pandas.
• Monitor a model for performance.
• Define risk in finance.

Stand-alone Option

This course may be taken outside of the certificate. 

Over an eight-week period, our course “The Psychology of Finance” will reveal the biases and volatility inherent to the human decision-making process in finance.

You will learn to:

• Describe concepts such as utility, probability weighting, the certainty effect, survivorship bias, risk, gains, and losses.
• Explain the causation/correlation error, the mental error in probability weighting, the consequences of the anchoring bias, overtrading due to overconfidence, the equity premium puzzle, and active vs. passive mutual funds.
• Evaluate subjective vs. absolute probabilities, overconfidence as the “mother of all biases,” and the framing and reversal of preferences.

You will be able to:

• Understand the psychology behind financial decisions made by business leaders and investors.
• Neutralize relevant biases.
• Make and encourage better financial decisions.
• Explain the consumer choice theory.
• Differentiate between mental models related to behavioral finance.

Stand-alone Option

This course may be taken outside of the certificate. 

Our eight-week Decision-Making and Risk Management online course focuses on the key concepts, definitions, principles, and practices in risk management from the perspectives of the corporation, the market, and the regulator. Topics in the course include corporate risk governance and enterprise risk management, assessment of risk at the corporate and capital allocation level, risk management products and structures, tools for decision-making in risk management, and regulatory risk monitoring and compliance. This course will be taught based on Harvard Business Review (HBR) cases and articles on financial risk management.

You will learn to:

• Understand different types of risks, risk analysis, and monitoring tools;
• Explore regulatory requirements, processes, and compliance;
• Use financial and statistical tools for risk analysis;
• Design strategies involving portfolio management, budgeting, and structure;
• Introduce risk governance and management into an organization’s culture;
• Learn about concepts and identify tools for decision-making within risk management, including derivative structures and risk analysis models.

You will be able to:

• Understand the principles of risk-management;
• Apply risk-management techniques and technologies;
• Analyze problems using decision-making criteria and theories;
• Utilize the characteristics of uncertainty to make educated decisions;
• Model different types of risks and decisions to forecast potential outcomes;
• Be awarded a certificate of completion from the University of Chicago and become part of the UChicago network.

Stand-alone Option

This course may be taken outside of the certificate. 

Over an eight-week period, our Fintech course will focus on applying the fundamentals to different areas like risk modeling, banking and market microstructure. You will discover the impact of fintech from multiple perspectives—investor, corporate, and consumer—and learn about the regulation behind it. This course gives you the opportunity to learn through practical case studies included in every module that will help you understand fintech with real-world examples that can then be applied within your working environment.

You Will Learn To:

• Understand the fundamentals of fintech, its application, and be able to articulate the benefits and drawbacks of fintech innovation
• Identify quantitative and qualitative approaches to fundamental finance, including risk modeling, financial ratios, and time series
• Explore how and why fintech innovations can help customers, both from a global and technical point of view, as well as how to improve customer experience in areas that have not had as much fintech innovation so far
• Investigate other security measures required to ensure fintech innovations keep customers and financial institutions safe

You Will Be Able To:

• Understand the current digital transformation of the financial services sector and how they have been able to change financing through new methods of lending and crowdfunding
• Comprehend the underlying technologies in fintech and their disruptive power, as well as their limitations and applications to different perspectives
• Increase your employability in a field that is rapidly expanding, knowing that recruiters are looking for a multidisciplinary candidate, understanding of fintech and its regulations
• Have your own fintech model available as part of your portfolio.
• Be awarded a certificate of completion from the University of Chicago and become part of the UChicago network

Stand-alone Option

This course may be taken outside of the certificate.