Credential program on the practitioner path
Certificate in Systematic Investing
Seven courses and a capstone on rule-based investing over months and years: asset pricing, trend, factors, carry, allocation and the portfolio construction and risk control that hold them together.
Systematic investing replaces judgment calls with rules written in advance: buy what has been rising, hold cheap assets over expensive ones, spread risk across markets that do not move together. The rules are public and the premia they harvest are well documented. What separates a good implementation from a poor one is construction, costs and the discipline to keep running a strategy through its bad years.
What does the certificate cover?
Asset pricing from the CAPM to multi-factor models; trend following on futures; value, momentum, quality and low-volatility factors; carry in currencies, bonds and commodities; portfolio theory, optimization, asset allocation and risk parity; bonds and option strategies as building blocks; the mechanics of trading futures systematically; and value at risk and stress tests for the finished book.
Who is it for?
Investment analysts and portfolio managers adding systematic methods, allocators who evaluate factor and trend managers, and individual investors who want to run rule-based portfolios properly.
The courses in this program
- Modern Portfolio Theory and the CAPM Markowitz's framework from first principles: expected return and covariance, the benefit of diversification, the efficient frontier, the minimum variance and tangency portfolios, and the capital market line, all computed in Python. It also teaches the capital asset pricing model.
- Factor Investing and the Fama-French Models How equity factors are defined, built and tested: value, momentum, size, quality and low volatility, the construction of long-short factor portfolios, combining factors, and the multiple-testing problem that hides behind hundreds of published factors. It also teaches the Fama-French factor models.
- Trend Following Strategies, Carry and Systematic Futures How systematic trend followers trade: time-series momentum, moving average and breakout signals, volatility-targeted sizing, diversified futures portfolios, and what a century of evidence says about returns and drawdowns. It also teaches systematic futures trading: rolls, margin and contract choice and the carry trade in currencies and commodities.
- Portfolio Optimization, Risk Parity and Black-Litterman Portfolio construction that survives real data: estimating covariance with shrinkage, constrained and robust optimization, risk budgeting and risk parity, hierarchical risk parity, and the costs of rebalancing. It also teaches asset allocation and risk parity and the Black-Litterman model.
- Bond Pricing, Yield Curves and Mortgage-Backed Securities Bond pricing and the yield curve from first principles to desk practice: price and yield, duration and convexity, bootstrapping and fitting curves, carry and roll-down, and hedging a bond portfolio's interest rate risk. It also teaches mortgage-backed securities and prepayment risk.
- Options Strategies Options strategies taught the way a professional builds them: from payoff and Greeks, with a view on direction, volatility and time, then sized, tested on history and costed for spreads and assignment.
- Value at Risk, Expected Shortfall and Stress Testing How value at risk is calculated, tested and misused: historical simulation, variance-covariance and Monte Carlo methods, volatility-weighted variants, time scaling, regulatory backtesting, and what VaR does not tell you. It also teaches expected shortfall, also called CVaR and stress testing and scenario design.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Financial Markets and Instruments A financial markets course for people who will build models of markets: what each instrument is, who trades it, where and how it trades, and what happens between the click and the settled position.
- 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.
- Mathematics for Quantitative Finance: Calculus and Linear Algebra The calculus, linear algebra, optimization and differential equations that pricing, risk and portfolio models are built on, revised and applied to finance. It also teaches the linear algebra for finance behind portfolios and factor models.
- The Black-Scholes Model and the Option Greeks Option pricing from the ground up: payoffs and no-arbitrage bounds, the binomial model, the replication argument, the Black-Scholes equation and formula, risk-neutral valuation, and numerical pricing in Python. It also teaches the option Greeks and hedging with them.
What is the systematic investing capstone?
You design a long-horizon systematic portfolio, combining a trend or factor sleeve with a diversified allocation, implement it on futures or equity data, and report its behavior across market regimes, including the periods when it lost. The faculty weigh the economic reasoning behind each design choice as well as 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
How is systematic investing different from algorithmic trading?
The horizon. Systematic investing holds positions for weeks to years and earns risk premia such as trend and value. Algorithmic trading usually means shorter holding periods and a larger share of the work in execution.
Does the program cover CTA strategies?
Yes. Trend Following Strategies, Carry and Systematic Futures covers the methods managed futures funds use, on public futures data.
How long does the certificate take?
72 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.