Beginner Financial Engineering

These are the three financial engineering projects I recommend you build if you're just getting started and you're kind of a beginner wanting to learn more about the space. What is financial engineering??!! Financial engineering is basically this field that combines math, stats, and computer science in order to solve complex financial problems. First one is to actually build a simple backtester for a simple strategy. You can backtest or pretty simple strategy like a moving average crossover and you'll be able to learn like what is a backtest, kind of like the common pitfalls and the common performance metrics that are pretty standard in industry. Second one, I probably should have said first, but that's building a real-time market data dashboard. That way you get comfortable with using and leveraging the different financial APIs that are available and that way you can test some of them out. Just try Wi-Fi finance for the start. It's going to lag, so it's not going to be real-time, but there are other APIs out there that you can use, but this is really where your curiosity should shine and you should find APIs that really suit your needs and what you're trying to build as well. Being able to add and alert yourself when there are changes in the market are really important. And so if you're using an API with like lagged data, that's not going to help you if the stock has dropped like 10%, and that was from 15 minutes ago. The last one is a Black Scholes Option Pricer. This is probably one of the most common projects that you do in financial engineering, but you get to learn a lot about implied volatility and the Black Scholes model. There are obviously tools that will alert you for this, but understanding APIs and types of market data is what this will help with.