Hello student

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the concept that describes machines that have characteristics of human intelligence. What you’re probably interested in is Machine Learning (ML), one approach to AI which has so far proven to be one successful approach to building these “smarter” (in a human sense) machines.

ML takes data, learns from it, and then uses it to make predictions. In general, it’s proven quite useful for computer vision (e.g. recognizing handwriting) and for classification problems (whether an email you receive is spam or not).

In the realm of finance, ML has played a role in helping institutions approve loans and assess risk. In trading, it’s also helped market/stock price movements—think linear regression.

There are very few ML courses that deal with trading. These are:

Machine Learning for Trading from Udacity

Machine Learning for Data Science and Analytics from Columbia University

Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree from Udacity

Note, only the first course on this list deals specifically with trading. The rest provide overviews while introducing ML in context of different industries (of which finance is one).

If you’re looking for something more cutting edge, I’d recommend looking into Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning specialization (series of five courses—$39/month) that launched just a few months ago. It specifically deals with one subset of ML, Deep Learning (DL), that’s transforming how AI applications in several fields already.

While the course doesn’t specifically address trading or finance, it does teach you the fundamentals of a technique that has shown promise already in trading.

Will there ever be a more advanced online course in this category (of AI and trading)? My guess is probably not. Most firms treat their algorithms, neural networks, techniques, hardware setups, etc. like their Golden Goose, one they’re not likely to share with the world.

My guess is that any future online courses on ML/DL and trading will remain fairly basic. That or you may learn about a handful of outdated or irrelevant techniques. Either way, you’ll at least gain an intuition for how people are applying AI to trading.

Happy learning