Courses on the MS in Finance
Orientation
MATHEMATICS & DATA PRE-SESSION FOR FINANCE – This course reviews fundamental concepts required to complete subsequent courses. It covers the basics of linear algebra, calculus and probability theory. It also includes MS Excel training, including functions and tools such as pivot tables, Excel Solver and Analysis ToolPak.
MAXIMIZING YOUR FUTURE – This course helps you connect your studies with your professional and personal development, gain insight into specific career fields, and perform a job search in parallel with your studies. We help in a tailormade way with assessments, one-on-one appointments, CV and online profile critiques, mock interviews, and strategies for connecting with alumni and other mentors.
Mandatory courses
FINANCIAL REPORTING & CONTROL – This course develops an understanding of the key concepts and procedures of corporate financial reporting and control. You will learn to understand financial information, and how financial information is developed, analyzed and used by both corporations and outside stakeholders.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT – This course provides a rigorous understanding of the principles of finance. You will be introduced to asset valuation and the concept of risk versus return, learn about the fundamentals of stock, debt and derivatives markets, and understand how companies make investment, financing and payout decisions.
INVESTMENTS 1: TRADING & PORTFOLIO THEORY | 2: ASSET PRICING – These courses offer the financial theory and quantitative tools for understanding how asset prices are determined, and how financial assets are used for investment. The first course concentrates on risk versus return, optimal portfolio selection, money management, and practical aspects of asset allocation. The second course focuses on the pricing, trading, and use of specific assets including stocks, bonds, and derivatives.
REGULATORY & POLICY ENVIRONMENT – This course provides an intensive and broad introduction to the post-crisis regulatory environment of financial markets, with particular emphasis on the US, the UK, and the evolving EU regulatory schemes. The course’s focus is balanced between regulation of traditional and new/exotic financial services, institutions, and instruments.
ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS – This course reviews the fundamentals of microeconomics: profit maximization, welfare, individual utility. You will learn how to use these concepts in economic models in real business settings. We add a number of elements into these settings to better approximate reality: variability, information asymmetry, risk aversion and government intervention.
Investments & Banking
BANKING & FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS – This course covers financial institutions from banks through asset management firms to insurance firms and pension plans, and their role in the economy from safekeeping through investment to wealth preservation and social functions. Much of the focus is on commercial banks and their interconnectedness with monetary policy and financial stability. The course also covers standard and new bank risk management tools and review recent developments in the regulatory environment.
FIXED INCOME ANALYSIS – This course covers analytical tools and techniques required to analyze fixedincome securities in modern financial markets. Theories, models, quantitative methods and their applications are emphasized. Reuters examples, case studies and a trading game are used to illustrate how market practitioners undertake fixed-income analysis, investment and trading.
DERIVATIVES – Derivatives are not financial weapons of mass destruction, as Warren Buffet once labeled them. If used in the proper manner, they are useful investment, speculative and hedging tools for corporates, individuals and financial institutions. We cover linear and non-linear products like forwards, futures, swaps and options. The material’s theoretical parts are analyzed with practical real-life examples and real type pricing using Bloomberg.
BEHAVIORAL FINANCE – This course reviews the effects of social, cognitive, and emotional factors on the financial decisions made by individuals and institutions. Psychological biases inhibit the individual’s ability to make good investment decisions. This has consequences for market prices and returns, and the resource allocation decisions made by corporate decision makers.
FINANCIAL ECONOMETRICS – This course introduces basic concepts and methods in financial econometrics. We introduce methods of predicting returns and volatility of financial assets, and for computing the levels of risk that investors face given a portfolio. Key terms covered include log returns, volatility, autocorrelation, AR, MA, ARMA, ARCH, GARCH and Value-at-Risk.
FINANCIAL TRADING DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY – This course introduces to the art and science of trading. Various timeframes, markets, instruments and analytical methods are discussed. Success factors of automated and semi-automated trading strategies are explored. You will, in groups, design, backtest and forward-test your own trading strategies, and trade them in simulation mode on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Software tools used include NinjaTrader, BlackBird and BloodHound.
Financial Management
COMPANY VALUATION – This course equips you with the various valuation techniques used by business consultants and bankers, as well as discusses how the various elements in these models are derived, and equally, how our inherent biases and preconceptions cloud the valuation process. We draw upon illustrations faced by a range of real-world companies across a broad spectrum of industries under different circumstances.
CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING – This course covers both aspects of corporate restructuring: financial and operational. Financial restructuring considers various improvements made to a firm’s capital structure, in line with their cash flow needs to promote efficiency, support growth, and maximize the value to shareholders, creditors and other stakeholders. Operational restructuring is the process of increasing the economic viability of the underlying business model through mergers and acquisitions or divestitures.
CORPORATE RISK MANAGEMENT – Companies are exposed to a variety of financial risks, including interest rate, currency, counterparty, commodity and M&A-related risks. You will learn what risks companies should manage and why, how risk management policies should be developed and organized, and how the various types of risk can be measured and managed. You will gain critical new insight into the operational problems that today’s corporations face, and how financial market conditions interact with corporate performance and decision-making.
ADVANCED REPORTING & CONTROL – This course examines the fine lines between estimation, assumption, mistakes, and deliberately misleading information. You will learn the fundamentals of corporate group reports, and take a dive into accounting practices around the world. The course equips future analysts and investors with the advanced tools to interpret published information, and to be on the lookout for omissions and misrepresentations.
STRATEGIC MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING – This course presents and analyzes a framework for creating a value-based performance management system. The techniques, methodologies, theories and practices behind organizational and customer value creation are presented in an analytical and critical manner.
BOARDROOM GLOBAL CHALLENGE – This course is designed to place you into realistic business and management scenarios. An on-line, turn-based, management-level business simulation forms the basis of the class. The simulation incorporates supply chain, finance, pricing, investment and marketing-related decision-making problems. The course exposes to the need for transformational and system-wide process-oriented thinking. The pedagogical approach is strongly focused on Kolb’s learning cycle and the experimental approach.
Technology & Innovation
BANKING IT & FINTECH: BANK TO THE FUTURE – This course covers the various dimensions of the banking IT operating model: infrastructure, application and data landscape, organization, business-IT interface, key IT processes, and major challenges arising from the technology-native fintech world. You will gain critical new insight into the operational problems that today’s banks face, and what the typical responses to those problems are.
FINTECH IN DEPTH – This course covers recent trends in financial technologies, examines how those technologies function, and summarizes academic research in the field. Among the technologies receiving a great deal of attention today, we discuss Bitcoin and blockchain, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, and equity crowdfunding
FINTECH IN TRANSACTION SERVICES: TRADING, SETTLEMENT & E-PAYMENT – This course covers technology applications related to transaction services. These include trading and settlement technologies related to trading platforms, clearing and settlement services; settlement services and technologies with emphasis on alternative real-time gross settlement technologies with links to the traditional banking system; nonbank and hybrid payment, trading and settlement platforms.
ENTREPRENEURIAL FINANCE – This course introduces you to both short and long-term financial planning for entrepreneurial ventures. We discuss how to measure a venture’s financial performance, how to evaluate budgeting technique and develop financial plans, and familiarize with international financial and tax planning and management. The course consists of a combination of lectures, case discussions, and building and analyzing financial models.
PRIVATE EQUITY & VENTURE CAPITAL – A key issue for all entrepreneurs is to secure adequate financing for their ventures. This course provides an overview of external financing options and the related considerations (terms and conditions), with a focus on equity financing. The course helps understand the structure and operations of the PE/VC industry, using up-to-date case studies, situation games and joint discussions.
Data Tools & Analytics
DATA FOR FINANCE 1: EXPLORATION IN R & VBA | 2: FINDING PATTERNS IN R & VBA – These courses introduce you to data manipulation and visualization in R and VBA. The first course covers descriptive statistics and fundamental data analysis. The second course covers inferential statistics with a particular focus on evaluating relationships and analyzing data using regressions. The courses focus on technical requirements, mathematical foundations and key techniques to be effective in data manipulation and visualization.
DATA FOR FINANCE 3: MACHINE LEARNING – This course introduce the fundamental concepts in machine learning. It discusses state-of-the-art algorithms used in science and in industry, such as regularized linear models, lasso and ridge regressions, decision trees, random forests, bagging, boosting, neural networks, support vector machine, deep learning. A large part is dedicated to getting hands-on experience, with concepts illustrated with R code.
CODING FOR FINANCE 1: SQL – This course introduces the basics of SQL from the perspective of database users in large organizations. You will learn how to structure queries for desired results and how to link different data tables. A possible follow-up course covers techniques to create powerful queries providing complex searches and data sorts. You will be understand what data management means, and the way SQL can be used to understand the business and capture data changes.
CODING FOR FINANCE 2: PYTHON PROGRAMMING, VISUALIZATION & TEXT ANALYSIS – This course introduces the fundamental building blocks of Python programming and how to write handy Python programs. We will start with the introduction to fundamental concepts including variables, conditionals, functions, sequences, collections and iterations, lists, dictionaries, and regular expressions. We will finish with an introduction to scientific computing such as Numpy, Matplotlib, and Pandas.
CODING FOR FINANCE 3: PYTHON FOR FINANCE – This course provides a broad understanding of the principles and techniques of Python’s finance applications through the use of coding in Jupyter notebooks with intuitively visualized output. These objectives are achieved by discussing theory, solving tasks and an interactive trading game.
DATA VIZ FOR FINANCE 1: INTRODUCTION TO TABLEAU – Business intelligence and data visualization are core components of the analytics skill set. This course provides an introduction to the main concepts in data visualization (reports, dashboards, data visualizations), together with a hands-on introduction to Tableau, a leading self-service business analytics and data visualization tool. Each session consists of a lecture and a hands-on Tableau seminar.