Syllabus · Academic Year 2026

Learn markets on the same surface practitioners use.

Finance curricula teach the math. The industry moves on data platforms. Convexity gives students the real terminal — primary filings, insider flow, macro, AI synthesis — at a student price you can actually justify to yourself.

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W01 — Orientation

What school teaches vs. what practitioners use.

Your coursework is rigorous. The gap isn't intellectual — it's infrastructural. The people hiring you read primary sources all day on tools you haven't touched yet. This is where that gap closes.

Academia
DCFs in Excel, Compustat screenshots, textbook case studies. Tidy, teachable, one step removed from the filing itself.
Industry
Bloomberg and FactSet terminals, live filings as they drop, alt data feeds, internal memos in Slack. Expensive, fast, messy, primary.
Convexity
The industry toolkit, priced for one person. Free tier included — real EDGAR, real Form 4, real macro, real AI synthesis. No synthetic data, no textbook screenshots.

W02 — Syllabus

The semester, mapped.

Twelve weeks, twelve primitives a working analyst should be fluent in. Each module pairs a concept with a route on Convexity where you can practice on live data. Run through the list in a term and you'll finish with a research workflow, not a stack of notes.

W01

Reading a 10-K

Skim the filing, pull XBRL line items, locate risk factors and MD&A without losing an afternoon to PDF scroll.

Try it on Convexity → /sec
W02

Form 4 literacy

Spot a real insider cluster. Separate 10b5-1 plan sales from open-market purchases by a CEO.

Try it on Convexity → /flow
W03

8-K timeline — tracing catalysts

Reconstruct a single name's last eighteen months from 8-K events and FinBERT sentiment deltas.

Try it on Convexity → /sec
W04

XBRL ratios

Normalise financials across periods and filings. Three-period comparison without touching Excel.

Try it on Convexity → /financials
W05

FedSpeak & macro

Read FOMC language shifts. Map dot-plot moves to the real yield curve.

Try it on Convexity → /macro
W06

Politician trades

Read the STOCK Act disclosure feed. Spot where Congress is actually buying versus what they're talking about.

Try it on Convexity → /congress
W07

Patents as signal

Use USPTO filings as an R&D thesis tool. Velocity, assignee concentration, claim density.

Try it on Convexity → /patents
W08

Options flow 101

Read unusual volume, block prints, and gamma exposure. Understand the difference between the tape and the derivatives tape.

Try it on Convexity → /flow
W09

Earnings calendar

Build a pre- and post-print playbook. Consensus, whisper, guidance, surprise history.

Try it on Convexity → /earnings
W10

Research memo with AI, cited

Draft a memo using the AI stack. Every claim resolves to a primary-source paragraph — if it doesn't cite, it doesn't ship.

Try it on Convexity → /ai
W11

Watchlists & smart alerts

Build a tracked universe. Wire alerts to insider buys, 8-K events, earnings beats, and unusual options flow.

Try it on Convexity → /watchlist
W12

Your first thesis

A written long- or short-idea, using every module above. Filings, flow, macro, synthesis. One memo, fully cited.

Bring it together → /ai

W03 — Reference

Concepts, mapped to tools.

When the textbook introduces a concept, this is where it lives in the product. Print the table. Tape it to the wall if that's your thing.

Concept Where it lives on Convexity
Beta / factor exposure /portfolio → Risk → Factor
EPS surprise history /earnings
Analyst consensus /research → Consensus
FCF yield / DCF inputs /sec → XBRL normalized
Insider cluster /flow
Risk-factor YoY diff /sec → Compare
Sector rotation map /macro
Patent velocity /patents

W04 — Enrollment

Student pricing, done honestly.

Free is a real tier, not a trial — delayed quotes, one watchlist, actual Haiku queries. Pro is $29 / month, less than one textbook chapter's worth. Pro Plus is for the student already writing a newsletter or running a paper book.

Free

$0

Claude Haiku · 10 AI queries / month, delayed quotes, 1 watchlist, 5 smart alerts, insider and politician trade feeds, SEC filings access.

Built for students who are still deciding if markets are their thing.

Pro Plus — $79 / mo

Claude Opus

1,000 queries + 20 deep-research runs, unlimited watchlists and alerts, semantic search across filings, API access (10,000 calls / mo), 5 years of history.

For the student writing a thesis, a newsletter, or a fund.

W05 — Glossary

The terms, one line each.

A handful of primitives worth knowing before the first reading. Nothing here is proprietary — these are the terms the professional world operates in every day.

10-Kannual report — the primary source Form 4insider buy/sell filing — two-day rule XBRLstructured filing data — machine-readable FinBERTsentiment model for financial text FOMCFed open market committee — meets 8× / year 13Finstitutional quarterly holdings report VWAPvolume-weighted average price DCFdiscounted cash flow valuation Alphaexcess return vs. benchmark Betareturn sensitivity to the market 8-Kmaterial event disclosure — four-day rule S-1registration statement — the IPO prospectus

W12 — Next Step

Open a free account; upgrade when you know it matters.

The Free tier is the whole reading room — filings, insiders, politicians, macro, ten real Haiku queries a month. If markets end up being your career, upgrade. If they don't, you learned on primary sources either way.

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For active traders For independent analysts For small funds & RIAs