Learning Goals

What will I learn? Will it be beneficial for my career? What is the Hedge Tournament?

Information technology is an essential ingredient for success in the fast-paced financial industry. GCOM7720 is designed to give you a competitive advantage in your next job by providing you with hands-on experience with coding to solve business problems, and a deeper understanding of the role of IT in financial domains.

The class is organized into three sections that build on each other.

1. The first section focuses on Process Automation.  You will learn the fundamentals of coding macros in Excel using commercial-grade IDE technologies: Visual Studio and Visual Studio Tools for Office.

2. The second section deals with Business Intelligence.  You will automate SQL queries that retrieve business information residing in remote enterprise databases (a logical next step if you have taken COMM3220) and present it in tables and charts.

3. The third section is about Financial Engineering. You will build a robotrader, a software that manages a $50mil portfolio of stock and options in turbulent financial markets and hedges financial risks by buying and selling securities in real time.  By participating in the yearly McIntire Hedge Tournament you will be able to tell to your employer an exciting story about how you and your team designed and developed technologies to solve a challenging business problem.

Learning objectives:

While the Tournament is an exciting endeavor, it is also a means to achieve broad educational goals. Comm4230 teaches you how to use Information Technology to automate and support decision making in business. Taking this class will help you to

• think computationally, i.e., understand in specific and practical terms how you can use information technology to solve business problems
• develop hands-on skills in current and widely-used tools for process automation, business intelligence, and financial engineering, so you can implement the solutions you envisioned.