Master of Science in Finance Concentrations

Completing a finance degree concentration allows you to dive deeper into a particular area of finance. In addition to completing your core coursework for your master’s degree in finance, completing a concentration signals to employers that you offer elevated skills, knowledge, and insights in your chosen concentration.

Learn more about finance degree concentrations at Illinois Institute of Technology and how these specializations can help you get on track for a fulfilling, successful career

Finance Degree Concentrations at Illinois Tech

Illinois Tech offers M.S. in finance degree concentrations in:

• Financial Technology
• Portfolio Management
• Risk Management
• Quantitative Modeling and Trading

To complete a finance degree concentration, you’ll take three courses in the concentration area as part of your five total elective courses for the finance degree. You’ll still be able to select your two remaining electives from a wide range of course options.

Read on to explore our finance degree concentrations in more depth.

Financial Technology Concentration 

Financial technology encompasses a wide range of computer-based hardware and software, including automated portfolio data analytics, payment apps, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending apps, investment apps, crypto apps, and more. These technologies are designed to improve and automate traditional forms of financial tools for businesses and consumers alike.

To complete the financial technology concentration, you’ll complete three elective courses:

MSF 547—Machine Learning for Financial Markets

You’ll study machine learning as it is applied in the financial industry. Importantly, the focus of the course is on understanding how to evaluate the performance of machine-learning algorithms in algorithmic trading and alpha-generation environments. Significant time is spent on data cleaning, preprocessing, and dimension reduction.

MSF 577—High-Frequency Finance and Technology

High-frequency trading is concerned with the development of robotic trading algorithms within a real-time market environment. This course focuses on the development of high-frequency models and the assessment of their performance.

MSF 591—Global Markets and Technology

You’ll learn how the equities, bond, money, foreign exchange, and derivatives markets are set up and operated. You’ll also explore how each of these markets operates in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Portfolio Management Concentration 

Portfolio management is the art and science of selecting and overseeing a group of investments to meet long-term financial objectives within the risk tolerance of a client, company, or institution. Successful portfolio management requires a keen understanding of the key elements of building and maintaining portfolios.

To complete this concentration, you’ll complete three elective courses:

MSF 544—Asset Valuation

In our Asset Valuation course, you’ll develop an understanding of equity valuation processes and applications. Topics discussed in this course will include dividend discount, free cash flow, residual income, and market-based valuations, as well as private and distressed company valuations. In this hands-on course, you will work in a group environment to complete and present an equity research report for a selected U.S. public company.

MSF 546—Quantitative Portfolio Management

The applied focus of the course centers on the process of moving from a dataset of historical information to the formulation of a forecasting model, the estimation of mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the testing of efficiency hypotheses within in-sample and post-sample settings.

MSF 545—Fixed Income Portfolio Management

This course covers the characteristics, valuation, and risk management of fixed income instruments. These instruments include bonds, repos, interest rate derivatives, inflation-indexed securities, mortgage- and asset-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and default swaps. The focus will be on understanding how these instruments are structured and used.

Risk Management Concentration 

Risk management involves identifying, assessing, and controlling financial, legal, strategic, and security risks to an organization’s capital and earnings. These risks develop from a wide range of sources, including financial uncertainty, strategic management errors, legal liabilities, accidents, and natural disasters, among many others.

Completing this concentration requires completing three elective courses:

MSF 555—Credit Risk Management

The extensive use of leverage by individuals, corporations, hedge funds, and private equity managers has significantly increased demand for models that analyze credit risk exposures. Credit risk involves models that aggregate exposure across borrowers, industries, and geographic regions.

MSF 544—Asset Valuation

In our Asset Valuation course, you’ll develop an understanding of equity valuation processes and applications. Topics discussed in this course will include dividend discount, free cash flow, residual income, and market-based valuations as well as private and distressed company valuations. In this hands-on course, you will work in a group environment to complete and present an equity research report for a selected U.S. public company.

MSF 535—Investment Banking and Venture Capital

This course focuses on key investment banking concepts and applications. You will learn about topics such as comparable companies’ analysis, precedent transaction analysis, discounted cash flow analysis, leverage buyouts, venture capital, and sell-side and buy-side mergers and acquisitions. Hands-on exercises include real company scenarios, using investment banking applications to solve in-class examples and problems, and an investment banking case.

Quantitative Modeling and Trading Concentration

Quantitative modeling and trading involves the use of computer algorithms and programs to identify and take advantage of profitable trading opportunities. Quantitative trading is widely used for high-frequency, algorithmic, arbitrage, and automated trading.

Successful completion of the quantitative modeling and trading concentration requires completing three elective courses in:

MSF 524—Models for Derivatives

In this course, you’ll learn mathematical and computational methods used to calculate the pricing and risk management of derivatives. The course focuses on important numerical techniques used in finance, and you’ll learn to program and implement financial models in MATLAB.

MSF 525—Term Structured Modeling and Interest Rate Derivatives

Upon completion of this course, you’ll understand the strengths, weaknesses, appropriate uses, and ways of implementing the major term structure models that are in common use. The course includes content on bootstrapping of forward curves, principal component analysis, fixed income derivatives, and implementing term structure models in Excel/VBA and MATLAB.

MSF 568—Energy Commodities Analytics and Trading

This course introduces environment, social, and governance (ESG) investments and energy markets and provides a systematic exposition of data-driven analytic models for energy prices and other risk factors. The learning objectives of this course are related to the energy risk professionals (ERP) exam and the social and climate risk (SCR) certificate from the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP).

Interested in Developing a Custom Concentration?

You can choose to earn a custom concentration by specifying a three-course sequence and obtaining permission from the program director. The courses should form a coherent theme, which you will be required to develop and communicate.