Financial Markets

Course Overview

This specialization is intended for students who want to gain a deep understanding of the functioning of financial markets and the role played by financial intermediaries. Students will analyze the role of liquidity in securities markets, and they will understand how security trading is organized and regulated and how it has been reshaped by algorithmic and high frequency trading, and how the trading process affects the formation of asset prices. They will also learn how to apply basic techniques to price derivatives and use them for hedging or speculative purposes. Finally, they will study how banking crises arise and propagate to the real economy, what regulators can do to prevent them, and how the “Fintech revolution” is shaping the banking industry.