Software engineering student project-get into finance

Question

I have to propose a topic for a software engineering project. I really would like this project to help me to get a job in financial/banking domain. I’m interested in three areas: Access Control Mechanisms, Data Security or Investment Banking/Trading. I’m also open to other ideas. I will have about 6 months to complete the project. At the moment I don’t have any financial knowledge. I’m not sure what kind of project I could do in order to get basic domain knowledge and meet the deadline. At the same time the level of complexity has to be appropriate for MSc Software Engineering degree. Your help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

One common "holy grail" application is something that scans market data to construct a "buy" (or "sell") list of securities that meet a specific financial criteria.

Answer 2

One of the hot issues in investment banking technology over the past few years has been grid computing. If you are comfortable with Monte Carlo analysis and are prepared to learn the math necessary to implement some sort of exotic derivatives pricing, then perhaps something like the construction of a derivatives pricing/risk management application sitting on top of a Map Reduce framework (particularly an OSS one, such as Hadoop) might be interesting. Especially if it also leveraged the EC2 cloud. You could also build upon an existing OSS quant analytics library such as Quantlib.

This is not an insignificant undertaking however! And may well exceed the scope of what you are expected to deliver for a Masters level project. But maybe there is some subset of functionality that might be interesting to work on.

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