Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• QST FE 454: Investment Banking
  Provides an overview of the economic functions provided by investment banks including a history of the industry, current events, and the difference between large, full service investment banks and smaller, boutique firms. Heavy emphasis on pro forma analysis and Initial Public Offering and M&A valuation techniques. Topics include: What do investment bankers do? What are the different types of analyses performed by investment bankers? What are the various types of financial securities? What is the underwriting process and how are securities priced? How are companies valued? How are potential synergies valued? The course will focus on the issuing process and pricing for equity, fixed income, and equity-linked securities. The course will also focus on the role of investment banks in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and other restructurings. Additional topics include equity research, capital markets industry regulations, as well as typical career paths and opportunities.
• QST FE 455: Financing New Ventures
  Students will be expected to have mastered key finance concepts including cash flow analysis, NPV, IRR and basic option pricing theory prior to entering the course. Introduction to raising "angel" funding and venture capital financing for start-up firms. Focus on capital structure analysis, capitalization tables, payoff diagrams, term sheets, equity incentives and negotiating with investors. Students are expected to prepare case studies for class discussion and become familiar with current events in the financial news about start-up company financings.
• QST FE 456: Fixed Income Analysis
  Covers the analytic techniques used in fixed-income markets to value and measure risk on traditional fixed-rate bonds, floating-rate notes, bonds having embedded options (callable and putable bonds), structured notes, and interest rate derivatives used to manage bond portfolios (primarily interest rate swaps, caps, and floors). Extensive use is made of Excel spreadsheet analysis, including the development of a binomial term structure model to value securities. Focus is on the impact of counterparty and issuer credit risk in fixed-income valuation. 4 cr.
• QST FE 458: Equities and Securities Analysis
  Students will be taught the fundamental skills in how to analyze a company and determine its suitability for investment. This course will teach the value-based approach to company analysis, which focuses on assessing a company's competitive advantage and its return profile. Key topics include competitive advantage, return on invested capital, financial modeling and financial statement analysis, and valuation.
• QST FE 459: Computational Techniques for Finance
  The course will teach students how to use computational techniques to implement financial algorithms for security pricing and risk analysis including, bonds, stocks, and options. This will be a rigorous, hands-on programming course to prepare students for quantitative jobs in finance. The overall objective of the course is to enhance the students' understanding of the well-known financial models used to price securities including bonds and options and to evaluate the risk and return characteristics of stocks and portfolios. After the course, students will have a deeper understanding of investment portfolios, risk management techniques that use derivatives, and arbitrage strategies. Additionally, students will become comfortable with a modern programming language based on functional and object-oriented programming which will enhance their job opportunities in a variety of fields beyond finance.
• QST FE 460: Equity Analysis for Strategic Decision Making
  This course is specifically designed to appeal to students who have a strong interest in both strategy and financial analysis. The focus of the class will be to bring financial analysis to the study of a company's strategy and learn how to analyze a company's financial statements to help evaluate the sustainability of a company's competitive advantage. This course utilizes that case-based approach in its teaching method and encourages active class participation.
• QST FE 469: Real Estate Finance
  Provides an introduction to and an understanding of real estate finance. Draws together and considers major functional areas including: structuring, ownership, finance, taxation, property valuation and analysis. The course provides a framework for decision making in the real estate investment and finance fields. The course is specifically designed to offer students interested in real estate careers a foundation from which to build. 4 cr.
• QST FE 498: Directed Study: Finance
  Directed study in Finance. 2 or 4 cr. Application available on Undergraduate Program website.
• QST FE 717: Topics in Financial Management
  To enroll, students must have completed the finance requirements in their undergraduate business degree. Given their knowledge of basic financial concepts, students learn more advanced valuation methods, risk-return tradeoffs, and investment principles.
• QST FE 721: Finance 1
  The objective of this course is to introduce the students to the theory and practice of corporate finance, and to provide the students with a set of analytical tools necessary to answer the most important questions related to firms' valuation and investment decision making first under certainty and then under uncertainty. The course can be divided into the following three building blocks: valuation, investment decisions, and the relation between risk and return.
• QST FE 722: Financial Management
  Financial Management examines three sets of problems: 1) saving and investment decisions by households, 2) investment and financing decisions by corporations, and 3) the role of securities markets and financial intermediaries in the economy. Decisions today affect the timing of and uncertainty about future flows of income; both timing and risk determine the current value of those future flows. This course develops the tools required to analyze these decisions and their interaction within the financial system.
• QST FE 730: Economics and Management Decisions
  The aim of the course is to present many of the decision problems managers face and to present the economic analysis they need to guide these decisions. In the first half of the course, microeconomic tools are used to structure complicated decision problems about production, pricing, investment, and other strategic issues, address uncertainty through probabilistic forecasts and sequential decisions. An additional goal is to distinguish different market structures and apply competitive strategies using game theory. In the second half, the focus shifts to the study of the national and global economic environments within which companies operate. We identify the drivers of fluctuations in GDP, inflation, interest and exchange rates, and other key features of the economies. Since governments play key roles in determining the fate of economies and companies, the final theme is the rationale for and efficacy of government policy tools.
• QST FE 810: Finance 2
  This course extends fundamental concepts of corporate finance and asset pricing introduced in the core. Corporate finance concepts covered are capital structure decisions, payout policy decisions, and real options. Asset pricing topics include market efficiency, multi-factor models for the risk and return, arbitrage pricing theory and contingent claim analysis and its use in valuation and risk management. The concepts are illustrated in practical examples that prepare students for their summer internships.
• QST FE 820: Corporate Financial Management
  This course provides an in-depth analysis of financial considerations relating to corporate growth. It addresses the setting of financial and corporate goals in terms of maximizing shareholder wealth and relationships among working capital, debt levels, capital costs, dividend policy, growth and the value of the firm. It also considers the requisite financial analysis associated with mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcy.
• QST FE 822: Fixed Income Markets
  This is a course primarily on fixed-income debt securities and markets. Emphasis is placed on the factors that determine bond yields, factors such as the coupon and maturity structure, liquidity, credit risk, and tax status of the security, and on measures of return and risk, statistics such as the yield to maturity, horizon yield, duration, and convexity. We will cover government debt (Treasuries and municipals), corporate bonds (investment-grade and high-yield), agency (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and mortgage-backed debt created via securitization (i.e., collateralized mortgage obligations). We will emphasize how interest rate and credit derivatives are used to manage portfolios of fixed-income securities.
• QST FE 823: Investments
  Introduction to the investment management process. Defining investment objectives and constraints. Introduction to Modern Portfolio Theory, CAPM, Fama- French factors, APT, efficient markets, stock, bond and option valuation models. Immunizing interest-rate risk. Active and passive investment strategies, fundamental analysis, trading practices, and performance evaluation. Introduction to the role of futures and options in hedging and speculation. Arbitrage and hedge fund strategies. Understanding the assumptions underlying the different approaches and their limitations. Topics related to current events and the recent financial crisis.
• QST FE 825: Advanced Topics in Investments
  This course is designed for students seeking to work as quants in a quantitative finance investments group. It covers utility theory, portfolio optimization, asset pricing, and some aspects of factor models, incorporating the impact of parameter uncertainty. The course does not cover risk management or fixed income instruments, nor does it describe how the financial services industry works. Rather, it teaches how a quant should optimize a portfolio. The course makes extensive use of R (Excel or VBA are not substitutes), optimization theory, statistics, regression theory (OLS, GLS, testing theory), and matrix algebra. Students should be very comfortable with these concepts before taking the course; further, students should already have taken a finance course covering expected returns models (CAPM), options and futures. The course emphasizes the ability to prove theoretical results and their validity, an essential trait for investments quants. Students who are not mathematically ready or want a wider and more general coverage of the topics of Investments should enroll in FE823.
• QST FE 827: International Financial Management
  This course analyzes corporations' exposures to financial risks in the global economy. It discusses national currency systems and currency volatility, and how corporations identify, measure and deal with exposure to such volatility. It introduces students to foreign currency markets, currency derivatives markets, and international financing markets that help corporations deal with the various risks they face and take advantage of opportunities that arise in foreign markets.
• QST FE 829: Futures, Options and Financial Risk Management
  Futures and stock options are recognized as important tools of investment and risk reduction. This course covers the theory of futures and option pricing and develops a framework for analyzing hedging and investment decisions using futures and options. Attention is paid to practical considerations in the use of these investments, tax and accounting issues and the institutional features of the market in which the various instruments are traded.
• QST FE 850: Private Equity: Leveraged Buyouts
  Private Equity (PE) is a major force in the capital markets, acquiring household names such as Dell, Toys R Us, Neilson, Nieman Marcus, and many more. This course exposes students to, and de-mystifies, the PE world. The focus is centered on LBOs and their position in the alternative asset class. Students learn about the activities of PE firms including formation, fundraising, investing (deal structure, terms, due diligence, governance) and exiting. We also discuss how other industry sectors serve or are affected by PE and who the players are. This is a capstone course that integrates marketing, strategy and finance to further the understanding of business evaluation. Case study and class participation are the primary modes of learning. Course offered jointly with undergraduate course SMG FE 450.

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