Credential program on the practitioner path
Certificate in Algorithmic Trading
Seven courses and a capstone that take a strategy from idea to a costed, sized and validated system, traded on paper and reported the way a trading desk would read it.
An algorithmic trading strategy makes a claim: that a rule applied to data produces returns after costs. The Certificate in Algorithmic Trading is about testing that claim properly. It covers how to state a strategy before testing it, how to build a backtest that does not leak future information, how to charge realistic costs, how to size positions so that a bad run does not end the account, and how to report performance so that a reader can tell skill from luck.
What will I be able to do after the certificate?
Build a research and backtesting pipeline in Python and in Backtrader, model returns as time series, trade pairs and spreads, add machine learning where it earns its place, validate a strategy with walk-forward and out-of-sample tests, size it with the Kelly criterion and its fractional variants, and report it with Sharpe, drawdown and the statistics that show how much of the result could be chance. The certificate ends with a strategy run on paper against live prices.
Who is it for?
Software engineers moving into trading, discretionary traders who want to systematize, and analysts who review strategies and need to know what a sound backtest looks like.
The courses in this program
- Quantitative Trading: Edge, Sizing and the Sharpe Ratio The research process behind quantitative trading: forming a hypothesis, building a signal, turning signals into positions, accounting for costs and capacity, and deciding whether an edge is real. It also teaches the Sharpe ratio and the other measures of trading performance and position sizing with the Kelly criterion.
- Python for Algorithmic Trading, with Backtrader How research code becomes a trading system: an event-driven engine, a broker connection, order and position state, risk checks, logging, and a strategy that runs on a schedule without you watching it. It also teaches Backtrader, the open-source backtesting library.
- Backtesting: Methods, Pitfalls and Validation Why most backtests lie and how to build one that does not: the biases that inflate results, realistic execution, walk-forward and cross-validation designs, and statistics that account for how many ideas you tried.
- Time Series Analysis and Financial Econometrics The time series methods behind trading signals and risk forecasts: stationarity, autocorrelation, ARMA models, unit roots, volatility clustering and honest forecast evaluation. It also teaches financial econometrics: regression, its failures and their fixes.
- Statistical Arbitrage, Pairs Trading and Cointegration How statistical arbitrage strategies are built and tested: mean-reverting spreads, residuals from factor models, market-neutral portfolio construction, trading rules, transaction costs and the ways stat arb strategies decay. It also teaches pairs trading and mean reversion and cointegration and spread trading.
- Machine Learning for Trading Applying machine learning to trading problems without fooling yourself: building features and labels from market data, linear, tree and neural network models, time-series cross-validation, feature importance, and turning predictions into a tested strategy.
- Algorithmic Trading Foundations: From Idea to Paper to Live An algorithmic trading course on the working basics: how electronic markets match orders, the order types an algorithm uses, three simple strategy families, the costs of trading, and a first backtest you can defend. It also teaches paper trading, and how to decide when a strategy is ready for real money.
What every course contains
Every paid course comes with the first seven and the certificate, whichever level it sits at. The proctored exam and the credential come when the course is taken as part of a Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship. Everything is self-paced: the material is yours to study in any order, at any hour, for the whole of the license.
- Workbooks. Written to train the thinking patterns and the important concepts of the course, with worked problems and the reasoning behind each answer, so that you learn to think the way the subject is thought.
- Audio edition. Focused, well-presented recordings with explainers and examples of the material, made to be interesting, relevant and entertaining, so that the general subject can be learned away from the desk.
- Notes. Pre-produced notes with every fact the course relies on, written out in full, so that nothing has to be transcribed from the films or the audio.
- Cheat sheet. One sheet with every important learning concept of the course on it, to keep beside you during the work and to revise from before the exam.
- Named sources. Every fact in the notes names its source, the paper, the book or the dataset, for anyone who wants to dig in further.
- Explainer films. Focused films, in the style of the sample films on the catalog page, that walk through the most difficult concepts of the course with visual explanations of a high standard.
- Transcript. A full transcript of every film and every audio recording, searchable and quotable.
- Proctored exam. Taken as part of a Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship, the course ends in a proctored multiple-choice questionnaire, with a pass mark of 60% and three retakes included. A course taken on its own is assessed by its coursework and has no exam.
- Verifiable certificate. A certificate of completion that a third party can verify: an employer sends the code on it to the credentials office and receives written confirmation of the course, the date and the result.
- Credential of the program. The Certificate, Diploma or Fellowship of the program, track or path the course belongs to, awarded when every course in it is passed. Which one depends on the program you choose.
What should you know before you start?
The courses in this program build on the courses below. They are not part of the program and not included in its price. If you have not studied this material, take them first. Admissions can tell you whether your background already covers them: the academy office.
- Python and SQL for Finance A Python for finance course with the Python every later course assumes: loading and cleaning market data with pandas, computing returns and risk with NumPy, plotting, and writing code another person can rerun. It also teaches SQL for finance, so your data lives in a database rather than in files.
- Probability for Quantitative Finance, with Statistics The probability every quant course assumes: distributions, expectation, conditioning and the limit theorems, with each idea tested on real return data. It also teaches the statistics for finance that every model rests on.
What is the algorithmic trading capstone?
You design one strategy, write its rules and its test plan before looking at the result, then build, cost and size it in Python. It is judged on data held out from development. The submission is the code and a report of about 3,000 words that a risk manager could read and act on. The faculty assess it against published criteria: whether the test plan was followed, whether costs and sizing are realistic, and whether the conclusions match the evidence.
What does the credential record?
It records that you passed the proctored exam of every course listed on this page and the capstone, assessed by the Institute's faculty. The credential is issued by the Institute. Each one carries a verification code that an employer can check with the credentials office.
Questions applicants ask
Will the course give me a profitable strategy?
No course here sells a strategy. The certificate teaches a method for testing whether a strategy works, and most ideas fail that test. Learning to reject them cheaply is the skill.
What programming level do I need?
Comfortable Python: functions, pandas data frames and reading other people’s code. Python for Algorithmic Trading is part of the program and covers the trading-specific parts.
How long does the certificate take?
78 hours of material across the seven courses, each hour with its audio edition and workbook, and a capstone of 20 hours of your own work. The license runs 12 months, so you set the pace around a job.