Hello Everyone! Welcome to the inaugural post from the Master of Finance Risk Management (MFRM) program. We are very excited to be a part of the ‘A Few Good Minds’ team so that we can give you a closer look at the MFRM program itself, insight into the world of Finance and a front row seat to watch us manage our $10 million SIAS portfolio.
The MFRM program is unique in that it is designed as a boot-camp to get you ready for the first day of work in the financial industry. Usually companies spend millions of dollars flying new hires to a central location to attend an integrated training program for a few months, the MFRM program allows graduates to hit the ground running on day 1.
So what exactly do we do in the MFRM program? In addition to learning fancy-sounding terminology like CAPM, VaR, heteroscedasticity, Ito’s Lemma, diversification, volatility, alpha, covered calls and hedging … we study basic financial building blocks so that we may understand, create and replicate financial instruments that exist in the world. Then, we learn about different tools used to analyze and interpret relationships that exist in the financial markets. Together, the building blocks and tools create an ideal platform for improving returns and understanding, measuring and mitigating risks that threaten portfolios.
Speaking of portfolios, one of the greatest assets of our program is the opportunity to manage the $10 million SIAS Fund. The chance to learn theory in the classroom and put it into practice in the active management of a portion of Simon Fraser University’s endowment fund culminates in an amazing montage of Bloomberg terminals, streaming stock information, MATLAB coding, and regression analysis. Behind the scenes we have students building models, students breaking models, investment decisions between equities and bonds, global asset allocation, sector asset allocation, identification of companies with the most potential for growth or that are the most undervalued and the execution of trades.
These are the key elements to our MFRM program. Over the next few weeks we’ll explain our program in more detail, tell you about the events we host, people we meet and anything exciting or interesting that crosses our path. Be sure to come back to this space next week Thursday at 10 am.
Written by Lauren Looi, Edited by Simon Hutchison