COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA237.3
COURSE TITLE: Haas Investment
Fund
UNITS OF CREDIT: 3 units (2 units
for spring semester plus 1 unit for fall semester)
INSTRUCTORS: Christine Parlour
and Bill Rindfuss
E-MAIL ADDRESSES: parlour@haas.berkeley.edu; rindfuss@haas.berkeley.edu
COURSE WEB PAGE
LOCATION: http://bspace.berkeley.edu
MEETING
DAY(S)/TIME: Mondays, 4:00-6:00PM through spring semester
PREREQUISITE(S): MBA/EWMBA233
Investments is strongly recommended to be taken concurrently. (The program offices have agreed that FT MBAs
enrolled in this course will be permitted to enroll in the EWMBA section of the
Investments course, subject to availability following EWMBA registration.)
CLASS FORMAT: Exercises, outside
training, team discussions, team meetings with instructors, and a team
presentation/pitch one afternoon (likely outside scheduled class time) in SF
Financial District.
REQUIRED READINGS: No set
readings; however, research by teams on areas contemplated by investment
strategies will be necessary, and readings in Investments course will be highly
valuable.
BASIS FOR FINAL
GRADE: Mixture of team performance in developing and testing investment
strategies, pitching to judges, execution of strategy, and quality of final
report.
ABSTRACT OF
COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: The Haas Investment Fund (aka Haas
Hedge Fund) is a full-year BILD experiential learning course that is open to
both FT and EW MBA students, and is subject to an application and selection
process. You'll have the opportunity to apply skills developed in finance and other
courses to active portfolio management, using an actual, dedicated investment
fund. The course is team-project based, with teams of approximately five students
developing, pitching and executing their investment strategies. These do not
have to be "quant" trading strategies -- just good ideas. The goal is
for each team to use past experience and unique expertise to innovate and
identify an "alpha" and then to trade on it. Specialized knowledge
that may appear to have nothing to do with "finance" can often be
used to identify a market inefficiency or mispriced risk. So bring your full experience to this course!
There are five steps to successfully completing this course:
- Devise an investment strategy,
- Evaluate it through rigorous back-testing,
- Present the team's proposed strategy to an outside board,
- Trade using capital allocated based on those presentations, and
- Evaluate performance in a final report.
This course is a year-long commitment: You must be enrolled for BOTH the spring '13
and fall '13 terms, plus you'll be monitoring investments over the summer. The timeline is:
- Jan to May: Develop
skills (training on research and portfolio analytics platforms at Haas) and a
strategy (with a focus on INNOVATION - the only restrictions relate to size of
the fund and transaction costs).
- May: Present to a board
drawn from the trading/investment/hedge fund community in the Bay Area (for
example one board member this past year is a former Chief Investment Officer
for Blackrock).
- June-December: Trade!
The initial several training sessions will be during the scheduled
class time. Timing of subsequent team
meetings and meetings with instructors will be during the scheduled class time
through spring semester or may be flexible based on teams' schedules.
Here is a blog post with further background:
BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES:
Christine Parlour is a Professor in the Haas Finance Group and her
research focuses on liquidity and trading strategies in financial markets. In addition to the Haas Investment Fund
course, she regularly teaches the Investments course in the FT and/or EW MBA
programs. She had been a Visiting
Economist at the SEC. Her academic work
has appeared in various scholarly journals such as the Journal of Finance, the
Review of Financial Studies and the American Economic Review. She is an associate editor at several finance
journals including the Journal of Finance and the Review of Finance.
Bill Rindfuss is a Professional Faculty
member and also Executive Director for Strategic Programs in the Haas Finance
Group. In addition to the Haas
Investment Fund course, he teaches, develops and brings
outside speakers for a series of applied
finance training classes in partnership with the Career Management Group and
MBA Finance Club. He represents the
Finance Group also with respect to MBA Admissions and Alumni Relations. He had formerly worked at JPMorgan and
predecessors in New York and San Francisco in several finance roles over twenty
years. He has an MBA in finance and management from Columbia Business School, and
a BA in mathematics and economics from Colgate.