Courses Infomation

The Heretics of Finance by Andrew W. Lo

Forex Trading – Foreign Exchange Course

You want to learn about Forex?

Foreign exchange, or forex, is the conversion of one country’s currency into another.
In a free economy, a country’s currency is valued according to the laws of supply and demand.
In other words, a currency’s value can be pegged to another country’s currency, such as the U.S. dollar, or even to a basket of currencies.
A country’s currency value may also be set by the country’s government.
However, most countries float their currencies freely against those of other countries, which keeps them in constant fluctuation.

The Heretics of Finance provides extraordinary insight into both the art of technical analysis and the character of the successful trader. Distinguished MIT professor Andrew W. Lo and researcher Jasmina Hasahodzic interviewed thirteen highly successful, award-winning market professionals who credit their substantial achievements to technical analysis. The result is the story of technical analysis in the words of the people who know it best; the lively and candid interviews with these gurus of technical analysis.

The first half of the book focuses on the technicians’ careers:

How and why they learned technical analysis
What market conditions increase their chances of making mistakes
What their average workday is like
To what extent trading controls their lives
Whether they work on their own or with a team
How their style of technical analysis is unique

The second half concentrates on technical analysis and addresses questions such as these:

Did the lack of validation by academics ever cause you to doubt technical analysis?
Can technical analysis be applied to other disciplines?
How do you prove the validity of the method?
How has computer software influenced the craft?
What is the role of luck in technical analysis?
Are there laws that underlie market action?
What traits characterize a highly successful trader?
How do you test patterns before you start using them with real money?

Interviewees include:
Ralph J. Acampora, Laszlo Birinyi, Walter Deemer, Paul Desmond, Gail Dudack, Robert J. Farrell, Ian McAvity, John Murphy, Robert Prechter, Linda Raschke, Alan R. Shaw, Anthony Tabell, Stan Weinstein.

What is forex?

Quite simply, it’s the global market that allows one to trade two currencies against each other.

If you think one currency will be stronger versus the other, and you end up correct, then you can make a profit.

If you’ve ever traveled to another country, you usually had to find a currency exchange booth at the airport, and then exchange the money you have in your wallet into the currency of the country you are visiting.

Foreign Exchange
You go up to the counter and notice a screen displaying different exchange rates for different currencies.

An exchange rate is the relative price of two currencies from two different countries.

You find “Japanese yen” and think to yourself, “WOW! My one dollar is worth 100 yen?! And I have ten dollars! I’m going to be rich!!!”
When you do this, you’ve essentially participated in the forex market!

You’ve exchanged one currency for another.

Or in forex trading terms, assuming you’re an American visiting Japan, you’ve sold dollars and bought yen.

Currency Exchange

Before you fly back home, you stop by the currency exchange booth to exchange the yen that you miraculously have left over (Tokyo is expensive!) and notice the exchange rates have changed.

It’s these changes in the exchange rates that allow you to make money in the foreign exchange market.

Salepage : The Heretics of Finance by Andrew W. Lo

About Author

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

His current research spans five areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk and financial regulation, quantitative models of financial markets, financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation, and healthcare finance. Recent projects include: deriving risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, and other behaviors as emergent properties of evolution in stochastic environments; constructing new measures of systemic risk and comparing them across time and systemic events; applying spectral analysis to investment strategies to decompose returns into fundamental frequencies; and developing new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel financing structures.

Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. His awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry M. Markowitz Award; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Econometric Society; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.

Lo is also a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers, and the boards of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University.