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FIN 401 · Fall 2026 · 3 cr.

Learn the surface professionals actually use.

Finance curricula teach the math; the industry runs on data platforms. Convexity gives students the real terminal, at a price you can justify between textbook chapters.

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FIN 401 · Markets in PracticeSection 01
InstructorThe primary sources themselves
Office hoursAlways (it's a terminal)
Prereq.Curiosity, a browser, an account
Lab fee$0 · seriously, free tier
W01
Orientation

What school teaches vs. what practitioners use.

Your coursework is rigorous; the gap is in the tools. The people hiring you read primary sources all day, on tools you haven’t touched yet.

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 · 12 weeks

The semester, mapped.

Twelve weeks, twelve things a working analyst does fluently, each paired with the route on Convexity where you practice it on live data.

  1. W01
    Filings

    Reading a 10-K

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

    Practice on Convexity → /sec
  2. W02
    Insider

    Form 4 literacy

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

    Practice on Convexity → /flow
  3. W03
    Filings

    8-K timeline · tracing catalysts

    Reconstruct a single name's last eighteen months from its 8-K events, item by item.

    Practice on Convexity → /sec
  4. W04
    Modeling

    XBRL ratios

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

    Practice on Convexity → /financials
  5. W05
    Macro

    FedSpeak & macro

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

    Practice on Convexity → /macro
  6. W06
    Alt-data

    Politician trades

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

    Practice on Convexity → /congress
  7. W07
    Alt-data

    Patents as signal

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

    Practice on Convexity → /patents
  8. W08
    Flow

    Options flow 101

    Read unusual volume, block prints, and gamma exposure. Tape vs. derivatives tape.

    Practice on Convexity → /flow
  9. W09
    Modeling

    Earnings calendar

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

    Practice on Convexity → /earnings
  10. W10
    Writing

    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.

    Practice on Convexity → /ai
  11. W11
    Workflow

    Watchlists & smart alerts

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

    Practice on Convexity → /watchlist
  12. W12
    Capstone

    Your first thesis

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

    Practice on Convexity → /ai
W03
Reference card

Concepts, mapped to tools.

When the textbook introduces a concept, this is where it lives in the product.

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
Tuition breakdown

What this costs vs. a textbook.

Honest, in dollars. The Free tier is real, not a trial. Pro and Pro Plus exist for when the spreadsheets stop scaling.

A single finance textbook
~$240
Bloomberg Terminal, one seat a year, retrieved 2026-07-22
$31,980
FactSet, one seat a year, estimate retrieved 2026-07-08
~$14,400
Convexity Free, a year
$0
Convexity Pro, a year
$290
Convexity Pro Plus, a year
$790

Drawn to scale, against a Bloomberg seat.

Free

$0

GPT-6 Luna · 10 AI queries / month, delayed quotes, 1 watchlist, 3 smart alerts, insider flow on a 24-hour delay, SEC filings access.

For students still deciding if markets are their thing.

Most students

Pro · $29 / mo · $290 / yr

Claude Sonnet

150 AI queries / month, real-time market data, 25 watchlists, 25 alerts, morning brief, options flow, unlimited history.

Less than one textbook chapter. Cancel from the settings page.

Pro Plus · $79 / mo

Claude Opus

1,000 queries + 20 deep-research runs, unlimited watchlists and alerts, semantic search across filings, backtesting, unlimited history.

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

W05
Glossary · before the first reading

The terms, one line each.

A handful of primitives worth knowing before W01. Nothing here is proprietary, these are the terms the professional world uses every day.

10-Kannual report · the primary sourceForm 4insider buy/sell filing · two-day ruleXBRLstructured filing data · machine-readable10-Qquarterly report · reviewed, not auditedFOMCFed Open Market Committee · 8× / yr13Finstitutional quarterly holdingsVWAPvolume-weighted average priceDCFdiscounted cash flow valuationAlphaexcess return vs. benchmarkBetareturn sensitivity to the market8-Kmaterial event disclosure · four-day ruleS-1registration statement · the IPO prospectus
W06
Office hours · always open

A teaching assistant that cites its sources.

Every AI answer ships with a citation back to the filing paragraph it came from. If the citation isn't there, the claim isn't made. That's the whole pedagogy.

You

Why is NVDA's gross margin so much higher than AMD's this quarter?

TA · Sonnet

NVDA's data-center mix is driving most of the gap. Latest 10-Q breaks out segment GM at ~78% for data-center vs. ~52% blended at AMD[1]. The mix-shift toward H100 sales is the proximate cause[2].

  1. [1] NVDA 10-Q (latest), MD&A segment table → /sec
  2. [2] NVDA earnings transcript, CFO remarks → /research

A sample exchange: the figures in it are illustrative.

→Active tradersKeyboard-first cockpit.→Independent analystsResearch surface for primary-source readers.→Funds & RIAsResearch, compliance, deliverables.

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

The Free plan is the whole reading room: filings, day-delayed insider flow, macro and 10 GPT-6 Luna queries a month.

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