Choosing electives in target ugrad b-school for trading

Hi, I'm an incoming 2nd year business ugrad at a target Cdn school (take your pick of a handful). I'd like to get into trading in London or possibly NYC (lots of precedents at my school, that isn't the issue).

My business courses are all finance, and I have 2 full credits/year of electives open to me. Out of upper year math, CS, or economics courses (open to dual degree as well), which would best help me land a job and succeed in trading?

 

I would like to know this as well.

In fact, what level of math skill (in the form of classes that may be taken at most target colleges) is required for certain products?

What level of math would aid a trader in trading derivatives? (Again, in form of general classes)

Yahtzee, +Hammy

 

as a trader your level of comprehension isn't expected to be as high as someone in, say, research. do a little bit of research on papers in those fields you mentioned. a very basic understanding of stochastic processes is certainly preferable as you can see (Except maybe credit?)

 
Best Response

for most trading roles, math is not a requirement, but it is helpful

off the top of my head

the basics:

calculus III, diffeq, and linear algebra - general prereqs to the following courses

calculus based probability - very important concepts and distributions

calc based stat - hypothesis testing/conf intervals, correlation analysis, multiple regression, all helpful stuff, prereq to time series

stochastic processes - the theory behind models (useful for credit to by the way)

derivative securities class - we had a derivative pricing course in our math department, prereq was calc based probability, mostly option pricing, go from ito's lemma and bs assumptions to the PDE, dealt a lot with greeks, did some monte carlo stuff, option tactics

advanced:

more advanced would be helpful in a quant role but probably not worth the effort otherwise. for example, time series analysis, measure theory, stochastic partial diffeq and stochastic calculus, etc.

if you have the basic stuff covered, you will have no problem picking up anything. with a solid math background econ just falls into place

 

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