IEOR E4711

Only 4 assignments, but some are extremely long and you should start ASAP. 1 optional project towards the end is offered to improve your grade, otherwise it's typically 20% HW, 40% midterm, 40% final

He's been teaching this course for years, but my experience with his class this semester gave the impression that he might be getting tired of it. We started off at a good pace, but he started to rush and explain less concepts after the midterm. You meet only once a week on a Monday from 6:00 - 8:30 PM. Not the most ideal time, and towards the end of the semester, it was pretty clear he wasn't into teaching at this time as well. This is great course if you are looking to go into finance, especially buy-side, S&T or capital markets. You will learn the basics of all the different asset classes, and it is meant to be an intro course. But expect class averages to be high and 90% of the class to be grad-level students with industry experience. If you don't have a strong background, lectures/OH are a must, because his slides are honestly very confusing in certain parts and you probably won't understand them unless he directly tells you.

Very manageable and a lot of extra credit opportunities.

Amazing professor who is a genius and very down to earth. I took this class as a econ major from CC and the materials are a lot more relevant and offer a comprehensive understanding of the capital markets than any financial econ classes I took with the Econ department. Highly recommended for Financial Economics major, who would want a foundational of the quantative side of Econ.

4 HWs 1 midterm 1 final 1 project (optional - if you want to reduce the weight of your exam scores) All very long and hard. He has a variable grading scheme to change the weights to maximize your score. It's still difficult to get a good grade though.

Sid’s a pretty chill guy. He works at a hedge fund which deals with distressed securities and really knows his sh*t. As someone who has no background in finance, I found this class to be on the harder side just because there was a lot of vocabulary I had to learn in order to solve problems. You learn about fixed income in the first half of the class - NPV, bonds, hedging, convexity, duration, forward rates, futures and swaps. The second half is equities and options (CAPM and brief overview of Black-Scholes included). The class is completely quantitative. All homework and exams involve problem solving. Find an arbitrage trade, hedge the portfolio, construct a portfolio to match the option, what’s the value of new shares issued, etc. There isn’t any hard math - it’s all simple algebra and there’s almost no calculus involved. The hard part is knowing all the terminology and strategies. There are a lot of them and you quickly understand that finance is about the nitty gritty details, not general theoretical understanding. There were 4 insanely long HWs (actually one of them was ok) that took forever to complete. The midterm was incredibly long and many students didn’t finish it in the 3.5 hrs allotted. The final was shorter and more reasonable, though still on the harder side. Problems are computationally difficult with lots of room for numerical mistakes even though you get to us…