FINAN 6810 - Fixed Income Investing Project

The Fixed Income course is a three hour per week seminar-style class with an experiential learning component. Each week, students research and read about a different area of the fixed income market, study quantitative methods used in it, complete Excel exercises, and then participate in a discussion in class. The emphasis is on questions and the open-ended discussion, not tests or lectures. The experiential component focuses on building in Excel using Bloomberg plug-ins a live risk management system for bonds, and using that system to simulate purchasing, maintaining and divesting a portfolio of corporate bonds. Each week, the class acts as an investment committee to make purchase decisions. The markets and techniques covered are: a general overview and the terminology of government, muni, corporate and international markets, coupon-to-zero bootstrap and yield curve construction, modified duration and bond portfolio management, corporate spread, rating and default analysis, Libor and futures markets, mortgage-backed securities and prepayments, credit default swaps and CDOs, private equity leveraged lending. Students are admitted to this course on a case-by-case basis.