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The Financial Market Research (FIN200A) class still has open seats for spring, and welcomes participation from students of all majors. It’s a two-credit course and is 100 percent project-based. 

The class meets weekly on Tuesdays with the instructor Alex Lau, and students are expected to meet independently on Thursdays. There is also a weekly conference call on Fridays with our corporate sponsor, RCM Alternatives, a proprietary trading firm in Chicago.

This is a great opportunity to engage in real-life industry research, and gain exposure to a very specific area of finance and data analysis-proprietary algorithmic trading.

This spring, our project will explore the topic of gap reversal trading in the futures markets. Specifically, our students will develop a trade plan to trade the price action in the grain futures markets around the daily open of the regular day session, when the opening price represents a gap from the prior day’s day-session close in the same direction (i.e., bullish or bearish) as the prior day-session’s price action. 

The first three weeks of this course will be devoted to the acquisition of the foundational knowledge of the grain futures markets and the fundamentals of futures trading. The specific markets we will focus on are corn, wheat, soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil. Emphasis will be on hands-on training in futures trading using TDAmeritrade’s Thinkorswim platform. 

The students will then progress to analyzing historical trade records with the objective of uncovering potential trade entry and exit parameters for a consistently profitable trade plan.

At the end of the semester, we endeavor to deliver a trading algorithm which will run on our industry partner’s proprietary platform, with simulated trading results using live data feeds.

If you are interested, or have questions, please email Prof. Alex Lau at alau@carthage.edu.