Week 1
Introduction & Finance 1-0-1
What this course is about and how it works, followed by the finance toolkit we build on all semester: assets, present value, time value of money, risk, compounding, and inflation.
Week 1 materials
What we cover
Introduction. Who we are, how the class is structured (lectures + weekly PC Labs), how you are evaluated, and what “finance with big data” means in practice — why modern finance is increasingly an exercise in extracting signal from large, messy datasets.
Finance 1-0-1. The core concepts everything else builds on:
- What is an asset?
- Present value and the time value of money
- Risk and return
- Compounding
- Inflation and real vs. nominal quantities
Before next week
Make sure you have a working Python setup with pandas, numpy, and matplotlib — the first PC Lab starts in Week 2 and uses them from the first line.