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Quant Finance Boot Camp

Fall 2025

Sep 10, 2025

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Dec 19, 2025

TBD

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Orientation

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Registration Deadlines

Jul 2, 2025

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All Erdős Summer 2025 Career Launch Cohort or Alumni Club members who are not participating in another Launch bootcamp

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Category

Launch, Certificate Program

Overview

This boot camp is designed to provide participants with a solid grasp of fundamental probabilistic techniques applied in financial markets.

Slack

Click here to be invited to the slack organization: The Erdős Institute

Click here to access the slack cohort channel: #slack-cohort-channel

Click here to access the slack program channel: #slack-program-channel

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Click here to download the Events & Deadlines .ics calendar file

Organizers, Instructors, and Advisors

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Thomas Polstra

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Office Hours:

Wednesday 12:00-1:00 central

Email:

Preferred Contact:

Slack

Do not hesitate to reach out with any questions you may have through Slack @Thomas Polstra

Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
Use probabilistic techniques to predict stock movement volatility using historical data. Use volatility predictions to evaluate a portfolio's value at risk and to price European option contracts using Monte-Carlo methodology. Create accurate European option price predictions by enhancing Monte-Carlo simulations through the use of control variates. Accuracy will be measured against closed-form solutions to option contracts provided by Black-Scholes option pricing equations. Adjust Monte-Carlo simulations of European contracts for the purpose of pricing more complicated option contracts whose expected value does not have a closed form solutions. Such option contracts may include American, Asian, lookback, and barrier option contracts. Develop hedging strategies which minimize risk and improve expected profit distributions of an option investment strategy. Backtest a trading strategy using historical stock prices.

Disclaimer:
By enrolling in this course you agree that in no event shall the Erdős Institute, its affiliates and their respective employees, agents, representatives and content providers or service providers be liable for damages of any kind, including, without limitation, direct, indirect, compensatory, special, incidental, punitive and consequential damages even if made aware of the possibility of such damages, whether in an action under contract, negligence or other theory, arising out of or in connection with the use, inability to use or performance of any course content, materials or services.

Project Examples

TEAM 9

Bubble Analysis

Samuel Magill

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github URL

Can speculative bubbles be identified (and timed) before they crash? This project builds a catalog of 69 U.S. equity sector episodes (1994–2024): 27 bubbles that crashed more than 40% and 42 "near-bubble" controls that rallied 50%+ but held, scored on 23 metrics spanning equity volatility, SEC filing language, bond credit-implied volatility, and a novel text-based credit signal. Using survival analysis and 10,000 leverage-stratified holdout splits with strictly pre-peak data, the full model identifies bubble sectors at 0.844 AUC (permutation p = 0.033), while equity volatility alone is statistically indistinguishable from noise.

Timing, however, fails completely: apparent month-level predictability is an artifact of the episode clock, and within fixed windows every feature performs at chance; crash triggers are genuinely exogenous. The result is a detection tool, not a prediction engine: it flags sustained leveraged fragility that can persist for years before a catalyst arrives.

TEAM 4

A fast calibration of the Heston volatility model

Ali Farsad

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github URL

We study fast calibration of the Heston stochastic volatility model following Cui et al. A discontinuity-free representation of the characteristic function yields an analytical gradient, enabling Levenberg–Marquardt calibration that is ten times faster than finite-difference methods and converges to a unique global optimum.

First Steps/Prerequisites

 
 
Zoom Passcode for Lectures:
 
039772
 
Zoom Passcode for Office Hours:
 
527363
First Steps

Program Content

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Course materials are available on github through the following link:

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Request Access to GitHub

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Program Content

Textbook/Notes

Note: our video player does not support playback speed options. You can find a third party browser extension which will allow you to modify video playback speed. For example, this one works for Chrome: video-speed-controller. If you would prefer to avoid a browser extension you can manually modify the playback speed in the javascript console as well: Speed up any HTML5 video player!

Heston Calibration

Lecture

Calibrating heston model on option market data

Slides
Transcript
Code

Project/Homework Instructions

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Project/Team Formation
Project Submission
Projects README

Schedule

Click on any date for more details

Orientation & Setup Week: Sep 11 - Sep 15, 2025
Phase 1 - Instruction and Project Completion: Sep 16 - Nov 5, 2025
Project Review & Judging: Nov 6 - Nov 12, 2025
Phase 2 - Intense Interview Prep & Career Connections for Certificate Holders: Nov 13 - Dec 19, 2025

Orientation

Sep 11, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 02

Sep 18, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 04

Sep 25, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 06

Oct 2, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 08

Oct 9, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 10

Oct 16, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Oct 31, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 01

Sep 16, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 03

Sep 23, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 05

Sep 30, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 07

Oct 7, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 09

Oct 14, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 11

Oct 21, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Phase II Orientation

Nov 17, 2025 at 07:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Sep 17, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Sep 24, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Oct 1, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Oct 8, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Office Hour

Oct 15, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Lecture 12

Oct 30, 2025 at 05:00 PM UTC

EVENT

Project/Homework Deadlines

Sep 21, 2025

03:59 AM UTC

Last day to defer enrollment to a future cohort

Contact Amalya Lehmann (amalya@erdosinstitute.org) if you would like to unenroll from this cohort and defer to a future cohort.

Nov 7, 2025

04:59 AM UTC

Final Project Due

You must submit all deliverables of your final project by this deadline.

©2017-2026 by The Erdős Institute.

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