A really fantastic course! Perfect for somebody with an introductory understanding of the R-programming language and of financial analytics. The course goes into some really complicated concepts, and by the end you will be analyzing Volatility Clustering with the GARCH model. But the professor walks you through at a steady pace so that it really does start to make sense. Luckily the exercises and quizzes stay reasonable and do a good job of reinforcing the material - they do not stretch you beyond what was covered. You are not expected to be an expert by the end.

I really like the professor, and the content was clearly explained and relevant. However, there are some serious technical problems with the course.

Let me preface this by saying I am very comfortable programming in R; I have been using it for econometric analysis for 5 years. Given this, I think it is unreasonable to demand that students to use a dated R version in the course. I did not "downgrade" my R to take this, and therefore experienced some problems.

These problems stem from the fact that the random number generator (RNG) default program changed in R version 3.6.0. Therefore, when using the set.seed() command to ensure our random samples matched those of the professor, I got slightly different results. This shouldn't have been a problem, but the professor arbitrarily decided that the answers to the quizzes and exercises should include six decimal places. If he asked for three or four decimals, this would not have been a problem and any version of R would be sufficient.

There is a solution to this; use the command RNGkind(sample.kind = "Rounding") before the set.seed() command. This sets the RNG default to that of R version 3.5. This explanation should be added to the course.

The other major technical issue is even more frustrating. The Russell 3000 and Russell 2000 data used in quiz 3 and 4 in EVERY week/module was removed for the FRED databases. See this article: https://news.research.stlouisfed.org/2019/09/russell-data-to-be-removed-from-fred/ .

This data was removed on October 4, 2019. When taking this course almost three months later, I found that this issue has not been addressed yet. Because of this, 8 of the 16 quizzes in this course cannot be completed.

This course has so much potential, but it is lost in the lack of maintenance.

Il y a un problème avec l'importation des données pour faire le quiz sur les raisons pour lesquelles je ne peux pas le réussir.