Investment Management and Entrepreneurial Finance

Catalog description

The Investments course comprises an intensive overview of the craft of fundamental investing in both the public and private equity markets. The pedagogy of F321 is three-fold: - Each of our 20 class sessions is taught by a great GSB alumni investor. These sessions are a mix of cases forcing you to come to judgments on potential investments, and talks around an investor's Investment Philosophy and underwriting approach. All of our speakers are fundamental investors (those who look to business fundamentals to determine future value) we do not bring in speculative traders, macro hedge funds, crypto pioneers, etc. - In addition to the class sessions, there is a significant amount of out-of-class reading. Two of the most influential investing books ever written - The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip Fisher - are required reading. These texts are augmented with a series of 10 Teaching Notes that we have developed to translate the principles and wisdom of Graham and Fisher, along with those of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Seth Klarman and other investment greats, into a concrete investment methodology that you can apply in practice. These Teaching Notes begin with a discussion of broad-based fundamental investing topics - risk-taking, modelling, valuation and capital structure fundamentals - and then outline the approach of a persona we have developed to reflect the views of Graham, Fisher, et al - the Conservative Fundamental Investor. - The class culminates in two final projects designed to put the learnings from the class into practice: (1) an Investment Memo on a public company, outlining a company overview, an investment thesis, a valuation assessment and ultimately your judgment of whether or not to make an investment in the stock of the company, and (2) a paper detailing your personal…