The goal of this course is to familiarize students with big data analysis to a wide range of practical financial problems. By the end of this course, students will develop a sufficient understanding of processes, methodologies, and tools used to transform a large amount of financial data into useful information to inform business decisions and actions. Students will also gain hands-on experience in designing highly scalable systems that can accept, organize, store, and analyze large and complex data structures that have financial applications. The course will use Python and R as the primary data analysis platform. No prior programming experience in Python or R is expected, but familiarity with basic statistics is presumed.