Introduction to Financial Engineering

IE 440 is where the IE toolkit — probability, optimization, stochastic processes — gets pointed at a single question: what is a financial contract actually worth, and how do you hedge it once you own one. You'll work through six homeworks that build from Markowitz mean-variance portfolios up through binomial-tree pricing and into the Black-Scholes PDE, deriving option prices by no-arbitrage and computing Greeks for hedging. It's the natural bridge between the stochastic processes and optimization courses you've already taken and anything quant-flavored afterward (derivatives desks, risk, or grad work in mathematical finance), and the reason the finance industry hires IE majors at all.