You'll have the chance to explore activities outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships, and networks. These include:
- Chicago Booth Banking Club - The mission of the Chicago Booth Banking Club (CBBC) is to further educational, networking, and professional development opportunities in an effort to promote careers in investment banking to its members. The CBBC’s goals are to help its members make informed decisions about whether a career in investment banking is right for them and to provide support should they choose to pursue such a career. While the CBBC is open to all members of the Chicago Booth community, including students and alumni of the Full-Time MBA and Executive MBA programs, it primarily serves the needs of the Evening MBA and Weekend MBA programs.
- Investment Management Group (weIMG) - weIMG provides students with opportunities to gain exposure to and delve deeper into the richness of the investment management field.
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:
- Theory of Financial Decisions 1 - This PhD-level course is concerned with models for portfolio decisions by investors and the pricing of securities in capital markets. It is meant to be difficult, but accessible to the motivated MBA student.
- Portfolio Management - This quantitative course presents advanced material relevant for portfolio managers, extending the material covered in Investments. Topics include the money management industry (mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds), modern techniques for optimal portfolio selection, liquidity and transaction costs, properties of asset returns, and investment strategies designed to exploit apparent violations of market efficiency.
- Advanced Investments - This course has one central theme. Asset pricing has undergone a sea of change in the last 20 years or so, with the realization that expected returns do vary across time, and across assets, in ways that the static CAPM and random-walk view does not recognize. We will cover a range of topics, including 1) how stock and bond returns can be predicted over time; 2) understanding the volatility of stock and bond returns; 3) multi-factor models for understanding the cross-sectional pattern of average returns, such as value, growth and momentum effects; 4) the size of the average market return and its relation to fundamental risks; 5) optimal portfolios that reflect multifactor models, return predictability, and hedging motives; 6) advanced trading strategies used by trading desks and hedge funds; 7) performance evaluation and benchmarks for funds; 8) liquidity effects and "bubbles" in stocks and bonds.
- Fixed-Income Asset Pricing - This course covers state-of-the art models and techniques required to analyze fixed-income instruments, and their derivatives, in modern financial markets. By the end of the course, students will learn (i) the basic concepts of fixed-income instruments, such as yield, duration, convexity; (ii) the modern empirical methodologies to describe Treasury and corporate bond data, such as "curve fitting," factor analysis, and default probabilities; (iii) the most recent modeling techniques for fixed-income derivative products used in the street, such as the models of vasicek, cox ingersoll and ross, ho and lee, hull and white, black-derman-toy, and heath-jarrow-morton; and, importantly, (iv) how to use these models in practice to value both traditional derivative instruments, such as swaps, bond options, caps and floors, as well as the more recent products, such as inverse floaters, range notes, mortgage backed securities, and credit derivatives. The key feature of Fixed-Income Asset Pricing is that it strongly emphasizes the applications of these models to value real-world fixed-income products, and their derivatives, by focusing both on the practical difficulties of applying models to the data, as well as on the necessity to use computers to compute prices.
- Financial Engineering: Cases in Financial Risk Management - Financial risk management is reported to be the main reason for the use of financial derivatives by non-financial institutions. This course has two main objectives. The first is to cover techniques to identify, measure, and manage corporate financial risk, as modern financial markets, and regulation require. Specifically, topics of discussion will include dynamic hedging and portfolio replication, the development of value-at-risk, the management of exchange-rate risk, interest-rate risk, credit risk, and operation risk. The second main objective is to build a framework to integrate financial risk-management solutions with long-term corporate strategy. We will discuss cases where the use of financial engineering was vital for the success of a business strategy. Typical applications in this case include privatizations, mergers and acquisitions, and financing strategies, among others. However, the course will focus more on the uses of derivative securities rather than their technical aspects.
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research and are recognized for their impact on the theories and models associated with investments and financial markets.
John H. Cochrane, is a research associate and past director of the asset pricing program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the Econometric Society. His recent publications include the book, Asset Pricing, and numerous articles on his research topics. 
Douglas W. Diamond, specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. His work has appeared in such notable journals as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy. 
Eugene F. Fama, is widely recognized as the "father of modern finance." Fama is among the most cited of America's researchers. He focuses much of his study on the relation between risk and return and implications for portfolio management. 
Tobias J. Moskowitz, was recognized by the American Finance Association with its 2007 Fischer Black Prize, which honors the top finance scholar under the age of 40. The award cited his "ingenious and careful use of newly available data to address fundamental questions in finance." 
Raghuram G. Rajan, served as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006. He is the author, along with fellow Booth faculty member Luigi Zingales, of the book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003. 
George M. Constantinides, studies the causes of the historically observed premium of equity returns over bond returns; the pricing and hedging of fixed-income securities, options, futures, and other derivatives; the effects of transaction costs and taxes on the pricing and hedging of derivatives; and portfolio management. 
John C. Heaton, studies asset pricing, portfolio allocation, and time-series economics. His research in these areas has earned him numerous fellowships, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Provost Fund Fellowship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
Zhiguo He, is primarily interested in agency frictions in corporate finance and asset pricing, with a special focus on contract theory. In 2007, he won the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance, which is an annual competition of doctoral theses from top business schools.