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Teaching Finance with AI

I believe that one of the most important things we can teach business students today is how they can use AI to be more efficient in the workplace. I’ve started this blog and…
May 3, 2025
Kerry Back

Julius and the Democratization of Coding

AI Overview
The world is aware that generative AI has made coders more efficient, but I don’t know if there is as much recognition of the more important fact that gen AI has made coding…
May 4, 2025
Kerry Back

Online Data

Finance
Python Tools
We can upload files to Julius as with other chatbots. We can then chat about the data with the benefit of python. In fact, Julius.ai started life as the “Chat with Your…
May 5, 2025
Kerry Back

Data Visualization

Python Tools
Python has very versatile plotting libraries. The primary libraries are matplotlib and seaborn, but there are others - for example, plotly and other libraries create…
May 5, 2025
Kerry Back

CAPM

Finance
Calculating betas is an easy exercise to do with Julius. We can also estimate the market risk premium, and we can get the risk-free rate from FRED, so we can estimate the…
May 6, 2025
Kerry Back

Building Stuff

Python Tools
A big advantage of coding (and using AI to write code) is that things can be automated. A student this spring told me that a friend of his in the finance industry had just…
May 7, 2025
Kerry Back

Prompt Engineering (or Not)

AI Overview
I use Menti surveys periodically to ask students what they would like to learn more about, and how to write effective prompts frequently shows up. In the first bit of time…
May 7, 2025
Kerry Back

Creating Apps

Python Tools
After the last session of my class in the spring, a student came up to me and said “I want to thank you. I never knew anything about programming, and now I can create apps.…
May 8, 2025
Kerry Back

Simulation

Finance
Simulation can be done in a spreadsheet but is better done elsewhere. An easy example of the AI + coding approach is to simulate a retirement plan.
May 9, 2025
Kerry Back

Mean-Variance Frontier

Finance
Mean-variance optimization is one of those topics that has always been awkward to teach with spreadsheets. It is messy to define the portfolio variance in a spreadsheet for…
May 10, 2025
Kerry Back

API Calls

AI Overview
This HBS case, about implementing generative AI at Deloitte Canada, is a useful tool for teaching the benefits, risks, and strategies of implementing AI in a corporate…
May 11, 2025
Kerry Back

Jensen’s Alpha

Finance
“Alpha” in this post will mean the CAPM alpha, that is, the intercept in the CAPM regression. It was first used to measure mutual fund performance by Michael Jensen, and…
May 12, 2025
Kerry Back

Fama-French Factors

Finance
The CAPM is intuitively reasonable and is widely used by companies to estimate their cost of capital, but it is well known to do a poor job of explaining average returns. I…
May 13, 2025
Kerry Back

Web Scraping

Python Tools
Getting data from websites is a task for which “AI + coding” can really increase efficiency. I use two examples to illustrate web scraping. The first is to extract a table…
May 19, 2025
Kerry Back

Capital Budgeting

Finance
Spreadsheets are perfectly suited for capital budgeting exercises. Those exercises involve a minimal amount of data (data = assumptions mostly) and only basic arithmetic…
May 20, 2025
Kerry Back

Form 4’s from EDGAR

Finance
This past spring, while Tesla was in the midst of a 50% freefall, the news media reported that Tesla insiders had been selling shares. Here, “insiders” means individuals…
Jun 2, 2026
Kerry Back
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