UNB’s Hands-On Quantitative Investment Management Course Lets Students Learn with Real Money
Managing investments is an exciting and lucrative career. But the training needed to excel in the field can be grueling.
Investment management is a complicated profession and grad students looking to learn the trade often struggle to grasp the big picture behind the complicated models they must study. That can leave them frustrated as they wonder how all their challenging coursework will be useful to them in the real world.
How many of those students have sat in a cramped classroom wishing they could just get their hands on some money already and start making moves?
A new course, available to students in UNB’s Master in Quantitative Investment Management (MQIM) program, lets them do just that.
Quantitative investing is a form of data-driven investing that relies on large quantities of data to analyze the market.
The “Quant Student Investment Fund” is a new elective from UNB’s MQIM that lets grads get their hands dirty as they manage a multi-million-dollar portfolio.
UNB’s faculty of management has offered an experiential Student Investment Fund course in partnership with Vestcor since 1998 in which students manage a portfolio using traditional investment methods. In the Quant SIF course, students are using quantitative methods.
Jon Spinney is Chief Investment Officer and vice president of Quantitative Investing with Vestcor and the Quant Student Investment Fund course instructor.
He explains that UNB’s MQIM program is designed from the ground up to be more relevant to investment decision-makers, risk managers, investment managers, and asset owners.
Students build a solid foundation in the theory behind what they’re doing. However, a hefty chunk of the program – including the student investment fund in particular – is designed to show exactly how the techniques are used by investors in the real world.
Spinney says the opportunity for students to get this level of experiential learning before they hit the job market is a game changer.
“I’ve taught in programs like this for the past decade or so, but this experiential course is completely different than anything else students would have seen before,” he says.
“We spend a lot of time in traditional courses thinking about solving problems, learning the theory behind things. And then students get into this class and they realize that a lot of the work they’re going to have to do is, you know, sourcing data and cleaning data and actually working as a group to share processes. It’s a very different way of thinking about things.”
Spinney adds that when he designed the course he had “no intention of creating anything that looks like a traditional university course.” Instead, he set it up “exactly the same way” he would work with his team at Vestcor.
Spinney says the program is designed for students from “all sorts of different backgrounds.”
Anyone with a combination of some math knowledge, some programming knowledge, or financial market knowledge can succeed by picking up the skills they’re weaker in over the course of the program.
He says the broad set of skills students hone means the MQIM program can also set grads up for careers outside of the investment world.
Spinney points out that students get exposure to standard techniques of data analysis, machine learning, and visualizations – all things that should be valuable across a wide range of future technical careers.
Because what they learn is very close to data science; for example, past grads have gone on to non-finance-related careers in data science or data visualization.
“These are all good skill sets to have and have been in demand over the past several years, for sure,” Spinney says.
More information about UNB’s MQIM and the Quant Student Investment Fund is available here.
This story is sponsored by the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Management.