Credential program on the practitioner path
Certificate in Systematic Investing
Six courses and a capstone on rule-based investing over months and years: asset pricing, trend following, factors and the portfolio construction that holds them together.
Systematic investing replaces judgement 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; the Fama-French models and how to test them; portfolio theory; and the mechanics of trading futures systematically.
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
- The Capital Asset Pricing Model The model that defines beta and the idea of a risk premium: the CAPM's assumptions and formula, estimating beta from data, using the model for cost of capital and performance, and the empirical tests that led to factor models.
- Trend Following Strategies 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.
- Factor Investing 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.
- Fama-French Factor Models The empirical asset pricing toolkit: the Fama-French three- and five-factor models, time-series regressions and the GRS test, Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions, standard errors, and how to judge whether a strategy has alpha.
- Modern Portfolio Theory 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.
- Futures Trading for Systematic Traders The mechanics systematic traders need in futures markets: contract specifications, margin and leverage, rolling and continuous price series, carry, and building a diversified portfolio across asset classes.
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: [email protected].
- Algorithmic Trading Foundations 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.
- Python 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.
- Probability for Quantitative Finance The probability every quant course assumes: distributions, expectation, conditioning and the limit theorems, with each idea tested on real return data.
- Statistics for Finance and Trading Estimation, testing and regression for financial data, with the traps that make trading research go wrong: dependence, fat tails and testing too many ideas.
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 behaviour across market regimes, including the periods when it lost. Faculty mark the economic reasoning behind each design choice as well as the evidence.
Is this credential accredited?
No. It is an unaccredited Institute credential. It records that you passed every assessed component listed on this page, marked by the Institute's faculty. It is not a university degree and is not issued by Carnegie Mellon University. Each credential carries a verification code that an employer can check with [email protected].
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 and Futures Trading for Systematic Traders cover the methods managed futures funds use, on public futures data.
How long does the certificate take?
144 hours of study. At eight hours a week, about four and a half months.