Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2
Description
With the rise in education costs and student debt, financial literacy and knowledge has never been more important. Sadly, the current reality is that financial literacy is not a staple in the curriculum for most of the American education system. Budgeting, saving, building credit and many other financial skills are key parts of your life right after college and very few students come out of school with a solid understanding of them. The goal of this paper is to introduce a few key elements of personal finance for those students and recent graduates who have little to no exposure to them. The topics I chose to discuss are budgeting, student loans, investing, and retirement. The numbers and salary figures are from Arizona State Career services to set up scenarios that many ASU graduates will face right out of school. More specifically the budgeting section is set up to mimic what income level, rent expense, and student loan payments graduating Sun Devils can expect to see right out of school. It was also important for me to introduce topics for long term planning like investing and retirement. Setting goals and preparing for the future, no matter how far down the road it seems, are fundamental for establishing a healthy financial foundation. Building a healthy financial foundation takes time, patience and understanding but it is a possibility for everyone. Establishing a very basic knowledge of these topics can help students immensely and utilizing this guide, along with other outside resources, students and graduates will be able to start their journey toward a more secure financial future.
ContributorsOliver, Corbett William (Author) / Brian, Sadusky (Thesis director) / Hoffman, David (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
My thesis is an exploration on the principles of algorithmic trading. I was introduced to the world of algorithmic trading in the Summer of 2018 when I got an internship at a startup trading firm called Helios Machine Intelligence. At HeliosMI, my job was to model algorithms for their in-house developed platform (in Java and C#). I learned how to model several different strategies, but I didn’t understand how, or more importantly, why these strategies worked. In the Spring of 2019 when I first began planning my thesis, I initially planned on recreating and optimizing HeliosMI’s trading platform. It was after reading a few books over the summer, namely; The Man Who Solved the Market by Gregory Zuckerman, Algorithmic Trading by Ernie Chan, and A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Gordon Malkiel, that I realized that I was much more interested in learning the fundamentals of algorithmic trading, so I decided to make this the new focus of my thesis. At HeliosMI, we tested strategies against the historical data of stocks using an application called QuantConnect. This application is easy-to-use, cheap (even offering a free tier) and provides plenty of documentation with an active community forum, making it the obvious choice as the platform for my thesis research. Throughout my research I focused on exploring high-frequency trading algorithms, mainly because these are the types of algorithms that are employed at Wall Street hedge funds, and also the type I worked on at HeliosMI. I developed three distinct algorithms throughout my research; a momentum based strategy, a mean reversion based strategy, and a preferred time of day based strategy. In my thesis report, I go in depth on each of these strategies, as well as discuss the history of algorithmic trading, and explore some future research aspirations.
ContributorsMaheshwari, Nicholas Leo (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Hoffman, David (Committee member) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05