ETC3510: Modelling In Finance and Insurance

- Each week from weeks 3 to 12, you completed a short homework task before uploading them on to Moodle. These were not too difficult, and were mainly just rehashing the lecture notes. There were some weird questions though, but fair marking meant that the penalties for not understanding the content fully was quite lenient.

- The 2 assignments comprised short-answer questions designed to extend your knowledge of the content. The first assignment made more sense than the second, but both did have quite a few curveballs in place. Try and start these as early as possible, as you only have around 2 weeks to complete them from when they are first released on Moodle. These are then uploaded to Moodle and submitted as a PDF or JPG file, compared to the past when they were placed in a submission box on campus, due to everyone being online. Again, the marking was very lenient, so you should be alright if you can understand most of the content.

- The applied classes were pretty standard. There was tutorial classes posted on Moodle, and each week your tutor would go through the solutions to those classes. The questions were much trickier than both the assignments and the exam, so do not be stressed if you get lost halfway through a derivation. Also, the tutorial classes this semester were recorded due to them being on Zoom, so you can always rewatch them later if you're stuck on something. I had Jeremy as my tutor, and he was excellent in his explanations. I appreciated having someone who could clearly show his derivations step by step through each problem. Both Jeremy and Kaustav are amazing tutors, and both are taking the subject next semester, so if you do take this or MTH3251 (Financial Mathematics) next semester do try and get one of them as your tutor.

That being said, the transition to online format was a bit rough. There was only 1 consultation hour per week with lecturers, and no consultation hours with tutors. There is the Mathematics Learning Centre, which if you do not know is extra help for any math subject. However, I went once and the tutor on hand had not taken this subject in a while, so was a bit lost on the content. Therefore, putting in extra hours to really understand the content is critical to doing well. There are only around 30 students who take the ETC version of this subject, and 95% of them are for actuarial exemptions. But if you're a maths student looking for something in the financial realm of mathematics to take, do take this.
The content is not extremely difficult, but does take a while to wrap your head around if you are from a non-mathematics background. Once that is done though, you can expect a relatively decent mark, as the assessments are only designed to push you to a pretty standard math level.

Firstly, this does not apply anymore. ETC3510 and MTH3251 are now taught as one unit, with the same lecturers, same content and same assessments. The only reason you would normally take ETC3510 would be for actuarial exemptions or for an econometrics major as part of a commerce degree.

Would I recommend this unit for someone with an actuarial background? Yes because although there is a steep learning curve, it is still a maths unit at its core so it is taught far better than some of the other level 3 ETC math units. Ivan and Fima have taught this course for over 10 years, so they are very well-versed in the content. Fima has written a number of books on it, which are the industry standard for anyone in the stochastic calculus field, so it is worth the opportunity to take this unit if you can, even as MTH3251.

- Covered the second half of the course on change of measure, binomial model & Black-Scholes. Ivan was always on point with his explanations, and made the maths far simpler by listening to him. He also wrote the majority of the exam, so if you were to listen to 1 lecturer for the whole of semester, it would be Ivan as he has designed the entire course structure to follow.

This was an invigilated exam done from your home using the eassessment platform and Monash eVigiliation. It consisted of 20 multiple choice questions over 3hrs. That may seem like a lot of time for 20 multiple choice, but a lot of them were very confusing at first sight, so it helped having so much time to go over each of the questions. That being said, I was still able to check over most of them a number of times before submitting. These mainly examined variations of definitions from the lecture slides, so were not excessively difficult. Like in the past, you are allowed to bring in 1 A4 double-sided sheet of handwritten notes, so try and make those notes as detailed as possible, and have as many of the key definitions from the lecture slides on them. For this semester, you were only allowed to write out solved problems from the lecture slides, not from assignments or homework solutions, so there aren't many problems to work with that can go on your cheat sheet. That being said, there was still plenty of relevant things that were able to be put on, so referring to them really helped as it enabled me to maximise my mark on the exam due to having so many formulae to be able to refer to. The exam was closed book as in the past, so again there are not too many complex calculations, you just to remember basic log laws such as log(1) = 0 and you should be good to go.

3 sample exams were available with solutions on Moodle. However, this semester the exam switched to 20 multiple choice questions, instead of in the past being just short answer questions. Therefore, the exams provided are only useful for extra revision material, and are not the type of questions you'd expect to see on the exam

(Chief Examiner & Unit Coordinator) - Covered the first 6 weeks of content covering Brownian Motion, Martingales & Random Walks. Fima is a brilliant lecturer. Even in the online format, he still managed to make the lectures engaging, and was always willing to explain tricky problems in consultation afterwards. I really appreciated the lectures with Fima, he is the main expert in the field of stochastic calculus, so definitely try and take this unit when he's lecturing it (semester 1 usually).

4.5 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

No textbooks are needed, the lecture notes are concise and relying on them should be enough.

3 x 1hr lectures per week
1 x 2hr applied class per week

Semester 1, 2020