25937 Financial Markets: From Fundamentals to FinTech

Description

This subject teaches students about financial markets and their evolution from both applied and research perspectives. It starts with the fundamentals: how markets are designed and operate, their roles, measuring liquidity and price discovery, and interactions between financial markets, asset pricing, and corporate finance. It then covers recent innovations and contemporary issues in traditional financial markets, including fragmentation of trading across competing markets, algorithmic and high-frequency trading, dark pools, recent regulation, and market design innovations. Finally, it turns to the rapidly evolving Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and Financial Technology (FinTech) ecosystems that are reshaping financial markets and the financial services industry, covering the underlying technologies (blockchain, smart contracts, tokenisation), the applications (Decentralised Exchanges (DEX), Automated Market Makers (AMM), tokenised securities, non-fungible tokens (NFT), peer-to-peer lending/borrowing, insurance and derivatives), and finally the challenges, risks, and future research areas.