Investment and Portfolio Management

Catalog description

This elective course on investing and managing portfolios emphasizes both conceptual foundations and practical implementation. The material in the course would be helpful to anyone interested in investing. However, the course should be especially useful to students interested in an investment management career (e.g., private wealth management, portfolio management in mutual funds and hedge funds, equity research, risk management, investment consulting, and investment banking). After discussing the three sources of portfolio returns (strategic asset allocation, tactical asset allocation, and security selection), we will do an extensive module on strategic asset allocation. This will take us through at least the first third of the semester. As part of the strategic asset allocation module, we will have a review of certain basic concepts and frameworks (e.g., the risk/return tradeoff) to ensure students have a solid conceptual foundation. We will cover both traditional and alternative asset classes that are available for strategic asset allocation. We will continue the semester with a discussion of asset pricing models and the basic analytical framework underlying active portfolio management. As part of this discussion, we will cover performance evaluation of asset managers. The last portion of the semester will focus on topics relevant to security selection. In particular, we will cover equity screening and multi-factor models. The course highlights trends in the investment management industry and introduces terminology and tools familiar to investment professionals. Course grade will be based on several group cases and Excel exercises as well as an individual final exam. (MHA-EL, MPA-TPA)