COURSE NUMBER: MBA237.3
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:
www.haasachieves.wordpress.com/2012/05//17/investment-fund-students-pitch
strategies-to-distinguished-judges/
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.