Syllabus
Data Driven Finance I
Spring 2025

Instructor

Kerry Back
J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics
KerryBack@gmail.com

Course Description

This course is an introduction to investments, including the analysis of corporate investment projects. We begin with foundational issues such as retirement planning and mortgage calculations. The next part of the course describes markets, assets, and properties of returns. We then study how to construct efficient portfolios of assets. The final part of the course pertains to the financial analysis of corporate projects.

Our analysis tool throughout most of the course will be python. Python is both more transparent and quicker to write than are spreadsheets, which are conventional for a lot of the topics we will discuss. Furthermore, the use of python will allow us to go deeper into some of our topics than is possible with spreadsheets.

Code snippets are sprinkled throughout the slides. Those snippets – plus the code used to generate all figures in the slides – are posted at the “Code Binder” link above. Clicking on that link will open a JupyterLab environment in your web browser. If you wish to do so, you can work in that environment for your assignments by launching a new notebook or modifying an existing notebook and downloading it. The binder is slow to load, so be patient.Alternatively, you can download notebooks from the github repo linked in the banner above.

Assignments and Grading

There are seven sets of weekly assignments, due by midnight each Wednesday beginning January 22. The final grade will be based equally on the seven assignments.