Courses I've taught at the Lundquist College of Business.
Undergraduate
FIN 380 · Investments
Risk and return, diversification, passive versus active investing, fair discount rates, models of expected returns, and performance evaluation.
We build from portfolio diversification to the CAPM and then use decades of empirical evidence to ask how priced risk should be defined, whether investors have made systematic valuation errors, and what backtests can and cannot tell us. The course concludes with the historical performance of active mutual funds.
Undergraduate / Master's
FIN 462/562 · Derivatives
Payoffs of forwards, futures, and options; no-arbitrage valuation; binomial and Black–Scholes pricing models; and the use of derivatives for risk management.
Derivative valuation is developed through replication: construct a portfolio of the underlying asset and a riskless bond with the same payoff, then use the replicating portfolio as the derivative's fair value. We also examine how derivatives alter risk-return exposures and why option prices can deviate from benchmark models.
Master's
FIN 610 · Advanced Topics in Portfolio Management
Advanced work in risk management and performance evaluation for investment analysts. The course emphasizes identifying portfolio risks, choosing desired exposures, assessing strategy performance, and decomposing the sources of that performance.
The main deliverable is a group research project. One project asks students to evaluate several years of stock transactions by a real hedge fund and recommend whether an asset-management firm should hire the fund.
Master's
FIN 683 · Investments
The master's-level version of the core investments material examined in FIN 380, with greater depth and emphasis on professional applications.
PhD
FIN 607 · Asset Pricing II
The second course in the PhD asset-pricing sequence, focusing on empirical tests of asset-pricing models, interpretation of the literature's findings, and their applications.
Topics include empirical asset pricing, market efficiency, behavioral finance, trading strategies, and performance evaluation. The course is designed as a starting point for continued research-level learning.