This hands-on program is designed to familiarize participants with fundamental machine learning approaches and data analytics techniques, enabling them to apply these skills to real-world financial problems. The course adopts a user perspective, teaching students to automate tasks such as classifying analysts’ conference calls into economically meaningful content. Participants will also tackle complex prediction tasks using various information sources, such as loan loss predictions and price/volume forecasts. Additionally, the course covers data analytics skills like data description, visualization, and statistical analysis of predictions. Python programming is utilized throughout the course to implement these concepts.