Investments Theory Mini, FIN 532

Philip H. Dybvig
Washington University in Saint Louis

Welcome to Investments Theory! This course introduces many general tools that are useful in managing investments, with a focus on asset allocation and professional money management. This is a fascinating area, and this promises to be a good term.

Site of the week! Cam Harvey's web site has a large number of useful and interesting things, including a 6,000-word hypertext financial glossary and various finance-related java programs backed up by actual data. Enjoy this financial playground!

previous sites of the week

The final exam has been graded. Generally, performance was good, with lots of competition for HP's. A lot of people made at least some mistakes in Part C but often got significant partial credit.

This term's exam

Practice:
...Final Exam
...Answers

More practice (courtesy Paskalis and Yufeng):
...practice problems related monthly data related annual data
...answer key
...even more practice problems
...answer key

Course Syllabus
Philip H. Dybvig Home Page

Experimental e-lecture (comments welcome!) on Lecture 1 materials
...download (zip format 9.5M)
...view online (sound may be slow to load)

The slides contain the information I expect you to be in command of at the end of the the class. I have produced three version of the slides:

Text-only

Fastest download, saves paper, lowest quality ascii equations

pdf (landscape)

Adobe acrobat format, same format as projected in class

pdf (portrait)

Adobe acrobat format, portait version (not the landscape version used in class): small font, more room for notes, may print much faster on non-PostScript printers than the landscape pdf version

Lecture 1: Overview
...Text-only version size 14K
...pdf (landscape) version size 70K
...pdf (portrait) version size 70K

Lecture 2: Measuring Performance
...Text-only version size 10K
...pdf (landscape) version size 72K
...pdf (portrait) version size 72K

Lecture 3: Mean-variance theory and the CAPM
...Text-only version size 10K
...pdf (landscape) version size 94K
...pdf (portrait) version size 94K
...(NEW) supplement pdf (landscape only) version size 63K

Lecture 4: Dynamic Models
...Text-only version size 14K
...pdf (landscape) version size 98K
...pdf (portrait) version size 98K

Lecture 5: More Dynamic Models
...Text-only version size 10K
...pdf (landscape) version size 83K
...pdf (portrait) version size 83K

Lecture 6: Some Cutting Edge Topics
...Text-only version size 10K
...pdf (landscape) version size 64K
...pdf (portrait) version size 64K