Dayle Scicluna Article for the Master It! Scholarship Following the Master It! Scholarship award that was part-financed by the European Union- European Social Fund (ESF) under operational programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life”, I went on to study a Master’s degree in Quantitative Finance at the University of Strathclyde. My degree focused on three main areas – finance, mathematics and computing. My course focused on quantitative techniques as applied on financial theory and applications. Such quantitative techniques are studied in courses such as stochastic processes and econometrics. Stochastic processes involve the use of stochastic differential equations which can be used to find the correct price of a financial derivative like an option contract. My course on Econometrics on the other hand covered techniques that are used to simulate the behaviour of financial markets. Techniques studied in this module included autoregressive, moving average and heteroscedastic models such as ARCH and GARCH models. In the finance modules I focused mostly on financial securities and portfolio theory and management. The main emphasis of the financial securities course was to analyse and delve into the properties of some of the mostly used financial instruments. In the portfolio management course I studied on different trading strategies. Computing courses focused on business analytics and programming. It is important for quantitative analysts to use computational tools and build models to analyse financial market behaviour (volatility etc.) and to price innovative financial instruments.