Online Master of Science in Finance Program Courses

This course is designed to develop each student’s financial analysis skill set. Throughout this course, students will be exposed to a variety of companies and industries with the goal of using various quantitative tools and qualitative factors to determine the financial health and risk of a company. The material covered in this course will correspond to various business applications including credit analysis, financial analysis, and investment analysis. During the latter part of this course, students will be exposed to advanced case study analysis using a team-building approach. MBA 501 will also introduce fundamental business concepts that will be used in other MBA courses.

This course has the following objectives: (a) to offer a comprehensive presentation of Microsoft Office Excel 201x; (b) to acquaint students with the proper procedures to create workbooks and worksheets suitable for coursework and professional purposes; (c) to enhance and reinforce students’ analytical skills and their ability to intelligently use information; (d) to teach the art and science of spreadsheet modeling; (e) to expose students to different approaches, support tools, and analytical methods for decision making; and (f) to improve students’ critical thinking skills.

This course applies economic principles to key decisions with organizations and solidifies intuition for understanding the business environments in which organizations operate. A key objective of the course is to develop tools useful in other Stuart courses. Economics is a key foundation for much of what is taught in finance, marketing, business strategy, environmental management, and virtually every other course in the graduate program. Economics is a way of thinking about problems, issues, and decisions that managers face in each of the functional areas of their organization. It stresses the importance of incentives in impacting human decision making and emphasizes the consideration of costs and benefits when making decisions. The course introduces and develops concepts in areas of microeconomics such as competition and market structure, incentive contracts, and pricing. Topics covered range from the most basic demand and supply models to principal-agent models and economics of information. The course will also touch on some of the primary macroeconomic topics (including GDP, inflation, and unemployment), topics in game theory (simultaneous and sequential games), and issues of ethics in economic policy-making pertaining to competitive and oligopolistic markets, pricing, and trade.

In this course, the student will learn the concepts and processes that underlie enlightened financial decision making in a global world. Students will explore how to raise debt and equity capital, how to think about what portion of earnings to retain and reinvest and whether to share some earnings with stockholders via dividend payments or repurchase of shares, how to value stocks and bonds, how to distinguish good from bad financial decision rules, how to decide which projects a firm should engage in, how to use futures, options and swaps to manage firm risk, how to ensure good corporate governance, why sustainability can be profitable while still protecting future generations, and how to manage the financial decisions required to effectively operate in a global setting.

This course provides a systematic exposition of the primary mathematical methods used in finance and the financial markets. Mathematical concepts and methods discussed are precalculus, calculus, and probability and statistics. Applications include simple and compound interest, annuities and mortgages, forward and futures contracts, bond pricing and duration and convexity, option pricing and strategies, solution of equations of value, optimization, volatility, elementary portfolio theory, Black Scholes option pricing, Binomial Option Pricing, and statistical inference. The learning method includes doing problems in class, quizzes, Final Exam, films, supplementary reading of relevant articles.

The primary goal is for students to develop an understanding of key investment banking concepts and applications. Students will be exposed to topics such as comparable companies’ analysis, precedent transaction analysis, discounted cash flow analysis, leverage buyouts, venture capital, and sell-side and buy-side mergers and acquisitions. During the course, students will interact with real company scenarios and will be required to use investment banking applications to solve in-class examples and problems. In the latter part of this course, students will work on an assigned case pertaining to a specific investment banking topic. This case will include a comprehensive data set and require Excel modeling. Because this is a “hands on” course, it will require both the student’s attendance and participation to learn the core concepts that are necessary to perform well on the class exams and apply the necessary material to the assigned case and homework problems.

This course will enable the student to understand the basics of financial markets and how they function in the global arena. The student will learn how the equities market, the bond market, the money market, the foreign exchange market and the derivatives markets are set up and operate. We will focus on the instruments, the players, the jargon, the details of the trade, and the institutional framework for each market. We cover both OTC and exchange-traded markets, and explore the dramatic transformation of these markets. The student will learn how each of these markets operates in the US, but will also learn how practices differ in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Most new ventures are not created by financial analysts. However, the success of a new venture is vitally dependent upon the strength of its financial controls. Knowledge of finance is also an important determinant of an entrepreneur’s ability to convey information about his company to banks, regulators, and potential investors. This course provides entrepreneurs with the financial knowledge that they require to create successful new ventures.