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:
- Bank Week - Bank Week provides students with an opportunity to visit banks in New York City during the week after the fall quarter ends. The International Banking Group (IBG) arranges for banks to host students for lunches, presentations, cocktails, and other networking events. Students participate in informational interviews and those interested in sales & trading often arrange to sit on trading desks while in New York for Bank Week.
- Hedge Fund Group - This group hosts guest speakers from the industry and seminars by Chicago Booth professors. The club also supports students in their recruiting efforts by cultivating industry contracts and assisting with resume preparation.
- Investment Banking Group - The largest student group on campus, the Investment Banking Group serves as a link between Investment Banks, Chicago Booth students, and Career Services. Their goal is to equip members with knowledge of the investment banking industry and aid in guiding them toward a career in their area of interest. It is our mission to educate the industry about the specific strengths of Chicago Booth students and the Chicago Booth curriculum. Throughout the year, we hold various events to help educate students about investment banking and aid them in navigating the recruiting process.
- Investment Management Group - This group provides information on careers in the investment management field and the practical workings of capital markets. It sponsors guest speakers and the Investment Management Conference. The Investment Management Group helps prepare students for interviews as well as provides students with an opportunity to learn how to present an investment thesis through pitches and writing an investment newsletter.
- Training the Street LBO Modeling Seminar - This intensive, one-day workshop is designed to develop an understanding of leveraged buyout analysis through actual hands-on construction of an LBO model. Each participant will build their own interactive LBO model from scratch to gain a detailed understanding of LBO analysis. The focus of the model is to effectively represent the interests of the three main constituents of the deal – the selling shareholders, the lenders, and the financial sponsor.
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.
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).
Adair Morse, studies corporate governance, entrepreneurial finance and household finance. She brings years of experience to the classroom having served as an assistant controller; a district accounting manager/auditor; a founder and partner of a leather goods company in the US and Poland; as well as intern at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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."
Robert Novy-Marx,studies asset pricing, real options, general equilibrium, and real estate finance. Novy-Marx has received an award from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association as well as the Western Finance Association's Trefftz Award.
Raghuram G. Rajan, served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund between 2003 and 2006. He is the author, along with fellow GSB faculty member Luigi Zingales, of the book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. He received the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003.