The trading firm and liquidity provider Optiver and Utrecht University have come together to offer a new course at the university called Algorithms in Finance, which will be a part of the university’s Banking and Finance Programme. Robbert Pullen, trainer at Optiver, and Utrecht University professor Dirk Gerritsen created the course.

“If you want to learn more about trading and want to create your own algorithm, this is your course,” says Pullen.

In the course, students learn about markets, trading, and how to analyse data. Student will also learn to programme in Python, to create algorithms. Python was chosen, according to Gerritsen, because firms in the financial industry desire employees who can programme in the language, and this goes for incumbents as well as fintechs.

At the end of the course, students go to Optiver and see and feel what happens on a trading floor and test the algorithms they’ve created during the course in a competition. The course begins in February 2019.