Portfolio Management

Greetings,

While the rest of the student body scrambles to study and complete their examinations (it is week 1 of exams), I have finished everything =D #endofgloat

Anyway, today's review will be on Fin4112k, or Applied Portfolio Management Techniques (this is the first time I am seeing the full title, I kid you not). If you want to do asset management in the future, you should be found taking this module. It's almost like the culmination of four years of theoretical work into something tangible - a legit portfolio. I can't say I thoroughly liked the module, partly because I wasn't overly interested in AM, just needed to clear fin mods. I did, however, enjoy learning new things every week. You will get to make educated guesses and derive portfolio weights all on excel.

It's heavy on the CA and heavy on the CA. And it's not an easy mod by any means. It's got everything to do with excel.

Yup.

Be prepared to a spend a full day figuring out how to do the tutorial questions each week. Prof likes to give a ton of readings hoping that his students would read it beforehand. I was diligent for the first three weeks or so... then I gave up reading lol. The papers were numerous and very very technical. Good news is that he doesn't expect you to understand it, instead goes through the important concepts in class and translates them into excel. Spoiler: The first assignment will be a shocker. Good luck. The interesting bit is of course that translation onto excel. For example, we studied the utility function in economics. One of the weeks entailed incorporating a utility function into the portfolio weightage - a very practical endeavour.

This Prof is very hardworking. Good news is the teaching is very thorough. Bad news is he will memorize all your names and he will know all the mistakes you make along the way (which technically isn't all that bad). This is seen most clearly during the mid terms: 3 hours of solid excel. Open universe. Take all that you've learnt thus far from the mod and answer his questions. The nature of the test necessitates many sub-parts which are inextricably linked. This means if you've made an error somewhere at the top... your error will carry forward for the entire question (or potentially the whole paper). BUT because Prof is so hardworking, he will give method marks. And his method marks is no joke. He essentially traces where your error was made, sub in the right values, and cross checks if you would have gotten the correct answer in the later parts. And since we all know that everyone does excel differently, it is an incredibly tedious process to mark everyone scripts. For that I really respect him.

Finally comes the individual and group report cum presentations. My only gripe with the module is that the individual portion requires one to do a thorough valuation of a chosen stock. I mean, this module is portfolio management, not valuation (fin4112h, which I hear this round was quite a sour experience for many). So why should we bother valuing at all? Well, prof did design the project to use that valuation, combining it with all your group's individual valuations to come up with a portfolio to run against a benchmark. Lots of hard work coming right up.

The presentations for the project will be in front of some legit industry ppl... Get ready to be butt smacked and torn down lol. HINT: Don't be the first group to present no matter what. Second is fine.

There is no finals for the mod, so by the end of week 13 I was done \o/

Cheers, have a good week ahead (studying or playing or choosing modules)
RRR