Q: At which colleges are you an educator, and what is your area of specialty?
Dr. German Creamer teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology and also at Columbia University. He teaches about computational methods, machine learning applied to problems of finance including portfolio optimization, trading and risk management.
Q: How long have you been participating in the IBKR Student Trading Lab, and what attracted you to it?
He has accumulated about 4 years of experience with the IBKR tools specifically with simulators design for microstructure problems.
Q: Can you describe a bit about how you’ve used the IBKR Student Trading Lab for the courses you teach and how IBKR’s tools have helped you meet your learning objectives?
The main course he teaches is “Investment Portfolio Construction and Trading Analytics”, also “Machine Learning in Finance” at Columbia. Students are required to develop a project where they use IBKR Student Trading Lab.
There are about 20 students from graduate programs at Stevens, 50 at Columbia mostly professional and graduate students.
Themes to explore in his classes include Harvard cases of investment management.
Q: What are some of IBKR’s tools you derive benefits from as an educator?
IBKR tools helps project managers to generate reports of a complete group and also student by student to follow up. The tools in term of performance and reporting are very useful to monitor the advance of the course.
Q: What are some benefits your students have experienced from their participation in the IBKR Student Trading Lab? Are there any success stories you can share? And how does the IBKR Student Trading Lab help your students beyond your course – after they’ve completed it?
The trading tools help students have a deeper understanding of the concepts. They can go back home after having a new perspective in terms of the decisions that they were taking before. Now, students feel more confident about opening an account and trade by using the mechanisms that previously were used in class. Students reach out professor Creamer about successful interviews in big firms such as Goldman Sachs where microstructure and the Trading Lab gave them the exposure needed and the advantage to dominate specific details of how the trading process works.
Q: What would you say about the IBKR Student Trading Lab to other educators?
Educators can benefit in courses such as derivatives or fixed’income valuation. Also, the API for Python or R will facilitate the conection between the tools any programming approach the student may have.
