PROFESSOR EGOR MATVEYEV: Hello, everyone, and welcome.
This course is part of MIT's MicroMasters program
in finance.
To the learners who have taken other courses in the series,
welcome back.
To the learners who are joining us for the first time,
I would like to welcome you to our MicroMasters program.
My name is Egor Matveyev.
I'm the executive director of the MicroMasters program
and a faculty member of the finance group at MIT Sloan
School of Management.
I joined the finance group at MIT Sloan in 2017.
I have taught various finance courses
in our MBA master's in finance and MBA Sloan Fellows program.
The scope of my teaching includes introductory classes
to MBA students and Sloan Fellows
as well as an advanced elective in corporate finance.
I also teach MIT Sloan's action learning course
in corporate finance and investment banking.
My academic research covers areas of corporate finance,
corporate governance, organizational economics,
and asset management.
In this video, I would like to give you
an overview of the MicroMasters program in finance.
The program consists of five courses.
Foundations of Modern Finance Parts 1 and 2,
Financial Accounting, Derivatives Markets,
and Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance.
Learners may begin the program with any of the three entry
point courses.
Entry points into the program are Foundations
of Modern Finance Part 1, Financial Accounting,
and Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance.
Foundations of Modern Finance is an important topic,
and in this program, we cover it in two courses: Foundations
of Modern Finance Part 1 and Foundations of Modern Finance
Part 2.
These two courses together provide
learners with a rigorous introduction
to the fundamentals of modern finance
and their applications to a variety of business decisions,
such as valuations of assets and securities, investment
decisions, risk management, and financing decisions.
We advise our learners to take both of these courses
and take them sequentially, as the second course
builds on the first one.
Financial accounting focuses on how companies provide
financial information to outside stakeholders,
like stockholders and creditors.
To understand a company, whether you
are chief executive officer and need
to make key strategic decisions or a hedge fund
manager deciding on whether to invest in a firm,
you must be able to read financial statements.
This course teaches you to analyze and understand them.
For this reason, this course is a required course
in most master of business programs.
Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance
provides learners with advanced mathematical topics
in financial engineering and quantitative finance using
linear algebra, optimization, probability,
stochastic processes, and statistics.
You will learn applied computational techniques
frequently used in finance.
Finally, our fifth course Derivatives Markets,
Advanced Modeling and Strategies,
provides learners with economic intuition and technical skills
necessary to understand how to use derivatives for investment
and risk management purposes and how to hedge and price them.
Upon completion of this course, learners
will have a sophisticated understanding
of tools for valuation and for quantifying hedging
and speculating on risk.