By the FinLingo Team | Capital markets practitioner, front office experience at a major European investment bank. FinLingo covers 342 lessons from bonds to exotic derivatives. About · Last updated:
FinLingo is not a full quantitative finance program — it does not teach stochastic calculus from measure theory. But it covers the quantitative foundations that every derivatives professional needs: Black-Scholes, the Greeks, volatility modelling, and risk metrics. The math that connects theory to the trading desk.
Level 3 — Options Pricing (8 units): binomial model (discrete intuition for risk-neutral pricing), Black-Scholes formula (continuous-time, closed-form), the five inputs and what each does, limitations of BSM. You can compute d1 and d2 by hand: S = $49, K = $50, σ = 20%, r = 5%, T = 0.38 → d1 = 0.054, call = $2.44.
Level 3 — Volatility (13 units): historical vol estimators (close-to-close, Parkinson, Garman-Klass, EWMA, GARCH), implied volatility extraction (Newton-Raphson), the volatility smile and surface, volatility term structure, realised vs implied and the vol risk premium.
Level 4 — Variance Products (6 units): variance swaps, volatility swaps, the replication portfolio (strip of options weighted by 1/K²), the connection to VIX.
Level 6 — Advanced Models (8 units): beyond Black-Scholes. Local volatility (Dupire), stochastic volatility intuition (Heston), jump-diffusion models, model risk, and the limitations of each approach.
Risk Management (10 units): parametric VaR (μ + z(α) · σ · √T), historical simulation, Monte Carlo VaR, expected shortfall, stress testing, backtesting. XVA (10 units): CVA, DVA, FVA — the post-2008 pricing adjustments that every bank now applies. Quantitative Essentials (8 units): Ito's lemma, risk-neutral pricing, change of measure, fundamental theorem of asset pricing.
Aspiring quants who want the derivatives math foundation before diving into PDEs and Monte Carlo. Risk analysts who need to understand the models their desk uses. Structurers and traders who want quantitative depth beyond the Greeks. Not a substitute for a Masters in Financial Engineering — but the best preparation for one.
No. A quant masters covers stochastic calculus, PDEs, numerical methods, and statistical modelling at a depth FinLingo does not. FinLingo covers the practical quant foundations: BSM, Greeks, vol modelling, VaR, and the intuition behind advanced models. It is ideal preparation for a quant program or for non-quant professionals who need quantitative depth.
Comfort with calculus (derivatives and integrals), basic statistics (normal distribution, standard deviation), and linear algebra basics. FinLingo explains every formula with intuition first, then the math. For Level 6 advanced topics (Ito lemma, risk-neutral pricing), familiarity with stochastic processes helps but is not strictly required.
Quant interviews test BSM derivation, Greeks computation, vol surface reasoning, and risk metrics. FinLingo covers all of these with interactive tools. The Vanilla Pricer lets you build Greeks intuition. The revision sheets provide all 66 formulas in one place. The curriculum grounds each concept in a numerical example you can reproduce in an interview.
The quant foundations every derivatives professional needs. 342 lessons. Level 1 is free.
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