Course Overview

This course is about using data to understand investments. Not in an abstract sense—we’ll work with real financial data: stock prices, mutual fund returns, interest rates, financial statements, and economic indicators. The goal is to build the skills to collect that data, make sense of it, and draw conclusions that hold up to scrutiny.

Most of the work falls into three areas:

• Gathering data — pulling it from public sources and APIs
• Processing it — cleaning, organizing, and transforming it into something usable
• Analyzing it — applying statistical tools to find patterns, test ideas, and evaluate investment strategies

The emphasis throughout is on doing things correctly rather than quickly. Financial data is messy and often misleading if handled carelessly, so we’ll spend real time on the parts that are easy to get wrong.

We’ll use Python for all of it.