“The AFP gave me exposure and structure to solve a real-world financial engineering problem, looking for potential methodologies, testing them empirically and providing reasoning behind the solutions, while working face-to-face with established professionals. Learning to present the process and intuitions behind the results has been quite useful in my current role.”
Sebastian Orozco de la Paz (MFE ’20)
Money Desk Operator, Banco Bci, Chile
“As a student in the AFP, I learned a lot of things beyond the textbook. I realized that industrial application could be vastly different from academia. So, after I started working at this company, I have managed several AFPs with students. They have contributed a lot to the project, and we have been able to leverage their fantastic work, as we have used some of it in our actual production. It’s definitely a win-win situation.”
Jeremy Zhu (MFE ’17)
Associate, CNH Partners LLC (Arbitrage Affiliate of AQR Capital Management)
“I have a data science background and was interested in pursuing a career in in the finance industry. For my AFP, I chose a machine learning project on interpreting financial texts using natural language processing (NLP). I had no prior experience in NLP, but the AFP gave me the opportunity to learn the end-to-end process, from scraping 10-K data from SEC websites to building latent Dirichlet application (LDA) models for topic modeling. Fortunately, during my internship, my team was working with LDA models, and I was able to share my knowledge with them.”
Mudit Gurnani (MFE ’20)
Senior Data Scientist, SoFi
“The AFP was a unique opportunity for me. The topic my group chose was about forecasting short-term price movements for execution algorithms. The project served as an excellent reference for me during my job search and opened up new avenues for learning.”
Shagoon Malhotra (MFE ’18)
Quantitative Researcher, BlackRock
“The AFP built a bridge between my education and my career. I worked closely with a company where I applied valuable skills from my MFE experience to a real-life situation. My performance led to a consulting position in the company, which became my reference for my current employer. I am grateful for my AFP experience and its critical role in my transition from academia to the private finance sector.”
Timothy Engle (MFE ’17)
Senior Associate, Morgan Stanley, NYC
“As an alumnus, it’s been a pleasure to participate in the AFP on the employer side. We have participated twice, and we’re going to keep coming back! There are a lot of complex and abstract problems we are looking to solve and only so many minds. They’re always going to offer us new and different perspectives. We want to view the students’ perspectives in case there is something we haven’t thought of.”
Jason C. Mercurio (MFE ’16)
Founder and CEO, Ageless Partners, Los Angeles
“I love participating in the AFP. It’s a way of vetting talent. If you have a data science problem, you know you can participate in UCLA Anderson’s AFP and find students to help you — you can depend on them! If I randomly select a CV of someone in this program, I know that person is likely to be productive, self-motivated and technically astute. Employers don’t want to have to start from scratch to find great talent.”
Gina Sanchez*
CEO, Chantico Global, LLC
*New Member to our MFE Advisory Board
“The combination of the excellent education in financial math and the eagerness to apply new machine learning techniques made working with Anderson students very productive. Their ability to codify the ideas made the combination even more effective.”
Peter Decrem
Director Rates Trading, Citi
“As an alumnus, it’s been a pleasure to participate in the AFP on the employer side. We have participated twice, and we’re going to keep coming back! There are a lot of complex and abstract problems we are looking to solve and only so many minds. They’re always going to offer us new and different perspectives. We want to view the students’ perspectives in case there is something we haven’t thought of.”
Jason C. Mercurio (MFE ’16)
Founder and CEO, Ageless Partners, Los Angeles
“The Applied Finance Project is an excellent opportunity to work with bright, enthusiastic students on a creative research project. The semi-monthly project meetings frequently inspire fascinating conversations that uncover new ideas and fresh approaches to traditional finance questions.”
Bradford Rowe
Director of Factor Research, Los Angeles Capital Management
“AFP is a win-win for both companies and students. For us, it's an opportunity to work on research projects that get postponed because of resource constraints. UCLA Anderson MFE students have excellent work experience and skills in Math, Finance and Programming needed to research and build a framework for banking projects.”
Achal Shah
Associate Director, KPMG
Examples of Past AFP Projects:
- Machine Learning for Risk Management in Fixed Income
- The Effects of Macro-Economic Events on Trading Activity and HFT Algorithms
- Twitter Sentiment Analysis
- Deep Learning for Valuation of American and Bermudan Options
- NLP to Interpret Company Reports
- Fair Value Model of Cross-Currency Swaps
- Multi-Factor Models for Global Equity Markets
- Social Impact Fixed-Income Strategies
- Bank Forecast and Credit Modeling Platforms
- Enhanced Portfolio Construction Techniques
- MSR Hedging Strategies
Topics Covered:
- Asset allocation
- Equity quant strategies
- Options and derivatives
- Fixed income
- Returns and earnings prediction
- Credit risk
- Machine learning
- High-frequency trading
- Text-based signals (NLP)
- ESG and social impact
- Cryptocurrencies
