Flex Curriculum
Complete the same rigorous curriculum as in our one-year option, but at a slower pace. Full-time students take 7 units each term and Flex students take 2–6 units.
Curriculum Overview (Two-Year Program)
All MFE students must complete 28 units of coursework, plus a 10- to 12-week internship or industry/independent study project. If you're employed while attending the program, you may be able to use your employment to meet the internship requirement.
Note: Students will be be required to be physically present on campus (about 2-5 days) at least twice during the two-year program.
First Year
Orientation (January | 1 Week)
The program kicks off with an informative and social orientation. During this week-long introduction to the program, you'll get to know other new students and gain a sense of what the classroom experience will hold. The orientation features team-building exercises, lectures, and workshops on special topics, including a thorough overview of the job market and career resources.
Term One (January–March | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230A (2 units)
This course covers the basic theories of asset pricing. It begins with the standard discounted cash flow analysis and generalizes this approach to develop the No Arbitrage Pricing technique for security valuation. Applications including fixed income securities, derivatives and contingent claims will be considered. The course will then examine the basic principles of optimal portfolio theory and consider special models of equilibrium asset pricing, including the Capital Asset Pricing Model and related Factor Models. Applications to equity pricing and portfolio performance evaluation will be explored. Programming and analytical exercises will be assigned.
MFE 230E (3 units)
This course reviews probability and statistical techniques commonly used in quantitative finance. It includes a review of normal, log-normal, and CEV distributions. This course covers estimation and non-parametric techniques commonly used in finance (MLE, GMM, GARCH) and introduces students to financial databases and to estimation application software for exercises in estimating volatilities and correlations and their stability.
MFE 230Q (2 units)
This course introduces the concepts and tools of stochastic calculus as required for effective pricing of complex financial derivatives in continuous time. The course stresses the practical applications of stochastic differential equations, Ito integrals, and measure transformations as required in advanced financial engineering practice and for the understanding of asset pricing theory. The material discussed in this course is used extensively in the some of the more advanced classes.
Term Two (March–May | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230I (3 units)
This course provides a quantitative approach to fixed income securities and bond portfolio management. The focus is on fixed income security markets, pricing and uses for portfolio management or for hedging interest rate risk. The course covers bond mathematics, term structure measurement and theory, immunization techniques and the modern theory of bond pricing, including the pricing of credit-risky bonds. It also covers derivative instruments (futures, swaps, options, exotic instruments). There will be extensive use of application and programming exercises.
MFE 230P (2 units)
This course proposes a guided tour through optimization models arising in practical Finance. These problems include ones that are traditionally associated with optimization, including asset and liability management, asset pricing, and portfolio optimization. We also describe optimization models arising in model calibration, prediction and estimation, and risk analysis. The course includes some recent approaches to the analysis of other kinds of financial data, such as text (financial news) data.
Term Three (August–October | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230H (2 units)
This course examines financial risk measurement and management, including market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, settlement risk, model risk, volatility risk, kurtosis risk and other types of financial risks. It includes risk measurement techniques for different types of contracts and portfolios (equity, fixed income, currency) such a duration, portfolio Beta, factor sensitivities, Value at Risk™, dynamic portfolio distribution analysis and extreme value analysis. It also includes risk management techniques for different types of problems such as trading desk risk management, total portfolio market exposure limits, counterpart credit exposure limits, and funding liquidity exposure limits.
MFE293 (1 - 3 units)
The Independent Study course is your opportunity to do research in an area of interest to you, in which there are no existing courses.
Elective offerings vary by year/term. See the list of current elective courses.
Term Four (October–January | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230J (2 units)
The objective of the course is to explore modern financial innovation through the lens of data science, and through a combination of lectures, cases, guest speakers, and applied data science projects. By the end of the course, the students will better understand the most significant financial innovations today and the critical role quantitative research can play in determining success.
MFE 230K (2 units)
Covers the strategies for achieving various investment objectives for portfolios/ instruments (equity, fixed income, currency, mortgages, non-traded assets) and applications (investment funds, pension funds, insurance companies, bank investment portfolios).
MFE 230S (2 units)
This course covers elements of behavioral decision theory and its implication in financial markets. Focus is on the psychological processes by which people make judgments and decisions, and the heuristics and biases associated with these decisions.
Second Year
During your second year in the program, you may also take core courses and/or complete the internship/independent study project if you haven't already done so in your first year.
Term Five (January–March | 8 Weeks)
MFE293 (1 - 3 units)
The Independent Study course is your opportunity to do research in an area of interest to you, in which there are no existing courses.
MFE 230N (0 units)
This is an applied project exploring an unresolved finance problem that is met in practice and involves the development or use of a quantitative financial technique. Participation requires prior approval of the supervising faculty member.
Term Six (March–May | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230D (2 units)
This course emphasizes the pricing of derivatives in continuous time, from the formulation of the pricing problem to the implementation of computational and numerical solution techniques. The course consists of three parts. In the first part, asset pricing theory is used to set up the pricing problem for a wide range of instruments with features such as early exercise, jumps, and path dependencies. The second part focuses on simulation methods for pricing both European and early exercise derivatives. The third part shows how to effectively use advanced finite difference techniques for solving a wide array of pricing problems.
Term Seven (August–October | 8 Weeks)
Elective offerings vary by year/term. See the list of current elective courses.
You may also take core courses you did not complete in your first year.
Term Eight (October–January | 8 Weeks)
MFE 230O (3 units)
This is an applied project exploring an unresolved finance problem that is met in practice and involves the development or use of a quantitative financial technique. Participation requires prior approval of the supervising faculty member.
Elective offerings vary by year/term. See the list of current elective courses.
You may also take core courses you did not complete in your first year.
Internship (10 to 12 Weeks)
The Internship/Special Topics in Finance project is a required condition for graduation. The internship or approved, on-site project takes place from late-May to early-August or mid-October to mid-January.
Students are eligible for one internship period only and it can be met in the first or second year.
Because of the school's reputation and close ties to the best firms, Haas has an exceptional record of helping students secure internships, consistently placing 100% of students each year.
NOTE: MFE Flex students must have the proper work authorization before applying for a job. The MFE program does not support any work authorization.
Learn More & Apply
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