NBA 5420: Investment and Portfolio Management
- This course is about financial markets and investing. The course should be especially useful to students interested in careers in asset management (e.g. private wealth management, mutual funds, hedge funds), trading, and investment banking.The first half of the course focuses on the tools of disciplined investing: portfolio construction and implementation, diversification, and arbitrage pricing. The first half also covers factor investing (value and momentum strategies), fixed income pricing, and performance evaluation of institutional investors such as pension funds, private equity, and hedge funds. We also study a variety of other topics, including IPO investing and various hedge fund strategies. The second half studies investing in the global macroeconomy. What determines monetary policy and how does it affect financial markets? What are the risks and opportunities of investing in emerging markets? We then examine the interactions of the banking sector with financial markets, especially the role of credit and leverage, and the consequences of financial distress, including contagion, fire sales, and flight to safety. We then apply these lessons to international investing and study current issues in countries such as China and Brazil.
- Download previous syllabus here
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NBA 5980: Behavioral Finance
- Behavioral Finance studies financial market phenomena that occur when some market participants’ decisions are not fully rational. This course introduces the conceptual framework of behavioral finance and investor psychology and then applies the framework to issues in stock market investing, real estate investing, and banking. Topics include: (1) investor psychological biases and irrational trading behavior; (2) limits of arbitrage and the risk of leveraged convergence trading; (3) predictability of stock market returns; (4) behavioral finance trading strategies (including value, momentum, size, earnings quality, corporate governance, and others); (5) stock market and real estate bubbles; and (6) credit booms and financial crises.
- Download previous syllabus here
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Other short classes I teach
- One-day Executive MBA class to Tsinghua-Cornell students (2017; 2018; 2019; previous syllabus here)
- Two-day Executive MBA class for SP Jain-Cornell program (2016, 2017, 2018; 2019; previous syllabus here)
- Corporate Finance Theory, Ph.D. level, module on financial intermediation (2018)