Our Courses
Our signature courses include standalone PDF based study guides combined with Excel data sets and templates. We call them value packs. Look up the concept in the PDF, follow through with its implementation in the Excel file. Extend your learning to your own version of the model.
About FinanceTrainingCourse
Created by a team of risk professionals with the objective of helping people learn, understand and apply financial concepts. For many years, we looked for a resource that we could use for training our new team members within the domain of risk management.
From Asset Liability Management to Portfolio Optimization, from Option pricing to interest rate simulations, from treasury risk to Basel internal capital adequacy assessment (ICAAP) we have helped customers and clients put real models at work to solve real life challenges.
Courses are written from a practitioner’s point-of-view, providing bite-sized concepts and topics with detailed application-oriented cases. Course outlines for individual subjects and learning roadmaps for broader topic-based review are provided.
Walk away from deriving equations & formulas … Focus on working models in EXCEL
Our History
Whether you are trying to comprehend asset liability management, simulate interest rates, build volatility surfaces, apply value at risk or optimize portfolio allocation across multiple asset classes, the traditional road to comprehension is littered with obtuse references. A large majority of textbook and academic courses in the computational finance field focus on deriving theoretical foundations. That works great if you are walking in with a PhD in Physics, Stochastic Calculus or Finance. But what if you are not? What if you have no idea how to translate the last 200 pages you have read into an Excel model that you can put to work tomorrow morning?
Welcome to FinanceTrainingCourse.com. We spent the last twenty-five years building financial models. We spent the last fifteen building bridges between practitioners in the field and Quantitative Finance. From Asset Liability Management to Portfolio Optimization, from Option pricing to interest rate simulations, from treasury risk to Basel internal capital adequacy assessment (ICAAP) we have helped customers and clients put real models at work to solve real life challenges. We use a unique market focused hands on model building approach that assumes very little prior advance quantitative background.
We assume some familiarity with finance, with statistical distribution, with Excel, and with financial modeling but that is it. You don’t need to be intimately familiar with the Black Scholes derivation, with Monte Carlo simulations or with Ito’s lemma.
The approach evolved from teaching short two day to week long courses to corporate banking and treasury teams and executive MBA students across the Far East and MENA region. It was further refined by helping client board members navigate the challenges of interpreting risk numbers and models and putting them to work in the real world.
Books by our Team
Based on two decades of teaching notes and Q&A sessions, working with back office, treasury, risk and regulatory reporting platforms in the MENA region, this book provides a comprehensive practitioners’ understanding of risk management and frameworks applied in the financial services industry.
Provides a hands-on, practical guide to derivatives pricing. Aimed at the less quantitative practitioner, it gives a balanced account of options, Greeks and hedging techniques avoiding the complicated mathematics inherent to many texts, and with a focus on modelling, market practice and intuition.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to fail as a founder? Could failure be the best thing that ever happened to you? If you crashed and burned, would you do it again?
This book takes you through Jawwad Ahmed Farid’s ten year adventure with startup failure starting in New York and finishing in Karachi.
Our Team
Agnes Paul FSA – Risk & Treasury, Subject Matter Expert
Agnes Paul is a Fellow Society of Actuaries (FSA), a diehard Broadway musical fan, a wannabe archeologist and the goto person when it comes to building models at FourQuants. She has the touch that takes a complex differential equation and turns it into a readable excel spreadsheet. She is the co-author of Risk Frameworks & Applications and an avid reader of everything we purchase for our library.
Fawzia Salahuddin PMP – Technology & Infrastructure
When it comes to technology, why things break, what we need to do to keep them running, we look to Fawzia. A Masters in Computer Science from FAST, Fawzia built and ran the team that wrote more than 6 products in the risk, treasury and portfolio management space at Alchemy Technologies. Fawzia is a PMP certified project manager and a member of the adjunct faculty team at the FAST NUCES City Campus.
Jawwad Farid, FSA – Risk & Treasury, Subject Matter Expert
Jawwad is the reason why the rest of us don’t have regular, normal, relaxing, career enhancing, bonuses with six figures, jobs. He enjoys teaching, trekking, reading, writing and corrupting young minds. When he is not doing any of the above you can generally find him at your nearest airport rushing to catch the flight before they close the counter. Click here to read more about Jawwad.
Uzma Salahuddin – Production, Content & Design
Everything you like about our site’s design and our publication is because of Uzma Salahuddin. Everything you hate is because of the few instances when we didn’t listen to her or she was travelling. While Agnes and Jawwad focus on producing hundreds of words an hour, Uzma ensures that they go out in the world in a readable form. With a first degree in Architecture followed by a second in Media Development, Uzma has edited everything we have produced. She is a perfectionist who has ensured that we put our best foot forward for the last seven years.
Meet the Trainer
Jawwad Farid has been building, implementing risk models and back office systems since 1993. Working with clients on four continents he helps bankers, board members and regulators take a market relevant approach to risk management.
Jawwad is a Fellow Society of Actuaries, (FSA, Schaumburg, IL), holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and is a computer science graduate from FAST NUCES. During the last twenty five years, he has worked as an advisor and a consultant in North America, Middle East, Africa, Far East, United Kingdom and Pakistan. His previous employers and clients include Goldman Sachs, Andersen Worldwide, Merrill Lynch, Asian Development Bank, Pacific Life, State Life, Wealth Management, Gabriel Partners, Security and Exchange Commission Pakistan, Adamjee Insurance, Dubai Islamic Bank, Mashreq Bank, May Bank and First Gulf Bank now (FAB).
Jawwad’s expertise include investment management, product development and risk models. He has advised multiple due diligence teams on risk assessment and valuation in banking, treasury and insurance sectors, set up FX and commodity hedging desks, built fair value models for illiquid securities for FAS 157 disclosures, estimated contingent liability reserves for banking and insurance products, implemented treasury and enterprise risk platforms, designed Economic Capital allocation strategies across business lines and helped a US$ 3 billion life insurance investment fund on allocation and bid patterns for 10, 20 and 30 year bonds, ALM mismatch and fixed income portfolio gap reduction in Pakistan as well as Middle East.
Jawwad has been engaged by the Central Bank, the Securities regulators, the local bankers and treasury association to put together and run nationwide capacity building programs specifically in the areas of treasury, enterprise risk, investment management and credit risk modeling.
Jawwad is the author of four books of which the latest two are Option Greeks Primer and Models at Work, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. His current work in progress project is a textbook on Portfolio Optimization Models that came out of his work as an investment advisor and as an instructor to Executive MBA students and bankers in Dubai and Karachi. Jawwad is an adjunct faculty member at the SP Jain Global School of Management in Dubai and Singapore as well as at Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, where he teaches Risk Management, Derivative Pricing, Treasury and Portfolio Management.
Jawwad volunteers as a mentor at the Google funded Nestio technology incubator in Karachi, sits on the Academic Board at IBA, moonlights as a volunteer track and field coach at a local athletics club and has been part of the judging panel that judges the financial applications, startup and e-learning categories at the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards for over a decade now.
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