When we designed our curriculum, we made a deliberate effort to ensure we could deliver more to our students than raw information. Every course in existence provides general information, but it's not particularly valuable unless it also helps you put the teachings into practice.

Our goal is to go beyond that and deliver more value by giving our students both the skills and the assets to immediately empower their trading with Python. Let's break that down more so you understand exactly what you'll gain by the end of this course.

Outcome 1: Tangible, practical, and lasting tech skills gained from examples, exercises and repetition

Coding skills are hard skills; not just in the sense they are difficult to acquire, but that they are significant competencies that affect the type of work you can do. In this sense, they're also quite tangible – you either have them or you don't.

Through 100+ code examples, dozens of quizzes, and 4 hands-on coding projects, you'll gain substantial exposure, practice, and repetition with writing Python code that will ensure you (1) develop the hard skills and (2) don't forget them any time soon. Guided by the research-backed pedagogic principles of spaced repetition and active recall, the lessons that follow are designed to achieve the following learning outcomes:

• Understanding of programming constructs and syntax, including variables, conditionals, loops, functions, and classes
• Experience developing, debugging, and deploying custom code for financial applications
• Mastery of data structures and algorithms, critical for optimizing code and handling complex computational problems.
• Skills in version control, facilitating collaboration and managing code revisions using platforms like Git and GitHub.
• Ability to design and manage databases, ensuring efficient storage, retrieval, and manipulation of data.
• Competence in software testing methodologies, ensuring the reliability and robustness of applications.
• Knowledge of software design patterns and best practices, leading to more maintainable and scalable code.
• Experience in integrating third-party libraries and APIs, extending functionality and interconnecting systems.
• Expertise in understanding and optimizing code performance, critical for resource-intensive applications and large datasets.
  

Outcome 2: Useful, applicable software assets that you can leverage in your research and trading

Let's clarify the meaning of "software assets" because it might be an unfamiliar term. A software asset could be source code, installations, executables, development environments, and libraries from which value can be derived. For example, if you wanted to sell an option, then the code that runs a model to get the optimal selling price for you to profit is a software asset. Or if you wanted to automate sending orders to an exchange, then the exchange connectivity library is a software asset to you.

Throughout this course, you'll build and receive your own portfolio of useful, ready-to-go software assets:

• Hundreds of reusable code snippets for future reference
• A working and well-structured development environment on your computer where you'll be set up to build new projects
• Real, useful source code from 4 completed projects encompassing:
  • Automated financial data collection and processing
  • Algorithm design and backtesting infrastructure
    
  • Options pricing and valuation
  • Limit order book implementation
  • Exchange API connectivity and automated trade execution
  • A bespoke market making program

Our mission isn't to just dump information at you; it's to level up your productivity. As you develop new skills, learn new libraries, and create new systems to automate your processes throughout this course, you'll be amazed at how much you can level up your trading with this powerful language alone.