The Analyst’s Course · Quant SQL
Why Investors Write SQL
The screener ceiling
Every commercial screener exposes a fixed menu: P/E below X, market cap above Y. The moment your idea requires logic between fields ("companies where receivables grew faster than revenue AND the FCF yield beats the sector median"), the menu ends. SQL — Structured Query Language — is the 50-year-old standard for asking arbitrary questions of tabular data, and it is the actual working language of quant funds, bank strategy desks, and anyone who analyses data for a living. Learning it on market data is the gentlest possible on-ramp: the table is small, the columns are familiar, and the questions are your own.
What the live table contains
The ClearView screener seeds a real SQLite database (in your browser, nothing sent anywhere) with the live universe: per ticker — symbol, name, sector, price, market_cap, pe, roe, roic, dividend_yield, revenue_growth, net_debt_to_ebitda, gross_margin, momentum_1m, momentum_3m, volatility. The ratios come from SEC-filed statements (the accounting track's pipeline), momentum and volatility from real daily history. Columns are lowercase with underscores; ratios are decimals (0.15 = 15%) — a convention you must internalize in lesson one or every future query will confuse you.
The survival skill
This track's payoff is not "you can screen stocks." It is the transferable loop: formulate a question precisely, express it as logic, execute, and read the output skeptically — including knowing the three classic ways any quantitative screen lies (lesson 5). Every profession that touches data runs on this loop; finance is just where the feedback is fastest and the mistakes are most expensive.
Renaissance, Two Sigma, and the query as unit of thought
The quant firms that dominated the 2010s were not better at picking stocks in the traditional sense — they were better at generating and falsifying hypotheses at scale, which required their researchers to query data directly rather than through intermediaries. The unit of intellectual work became the query: express a conjecture about cross-sectional patterns, run it across history, measure. You will not rebuild Renaissance in this track; you will learn the mental move that makes such firms possible — precise questions, executable answers.
What you'll practise
The `pe` column shows 18.5 and `roe` shows 0.32. What does the roe mean?
3 graded checkpoints · certification exam at the end of the track
Sources
Fama & French (1992, 2015); Daniel & Moskowitz (2016); screener traps per standard practice
Learn content is for education only — not individualized financial advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Options involve substantial risk. Examples are simplified and historical patterns never guarantee future results.