Instructor: Jasmine Yur-Austin Ph.D.

Office: College of Business Administration Room #322

Telephone number: (562)985-5639 or (562)985-4569 leave the message

E-mail address: jaustin@csulb.edu

Class hours: M 7:00 pm-9:45 pm

Office hours: M 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, or by appointment. I encourage you to visit me with any questions you may have about this course.

I. Course Description

This course is going to introduce different types of investment instruments, such as mutual funds, common stocks, fixed income securities like bonds, derivative securities like options, warrants, futures, and convertible securities. At the beginning of each class meeting, I discuss "What is news" keeping students informed about updated economic news, FOMC possible move on interest rate, upcoming important earning announcements, merger/acquisition announcements, and other corporations announcements. Especially, students are encouraged to participate in discussing current news in financial markets. This course is designed to provide an appropriate combination of theoretical knowledge with practical issues in the arena of investment.

In addition, this class requires students to work on a group project. In the past, different projects have been assigned to my FIN 350 classes. The previous projects including Evaluating portfolio performance, Evaluating mutual funds’ performance, Examining market response to stock split announcements, Examining the stock price reaction of merger announcements on acquiring firms and target firms, Are the internet stocks really "overpriced?", Cross- industry examination on post-IPO performance, and Examining the market reaction to earning surprises.

The topic of a group project of this semester is "Investigating Price Volatility and Trading Volume Volatility when Firms Adding to S&P 500 Index". Please refer to the project guideline for detailed description. Students are often required to report the progress of their projects. At the end of semester, students have to document their findings in their written reports and give an oral presentation.

The purpose of this course is designed to help students understand the fundamental investment knowledge and further develop problems solving skills. The methodology used to achieve this objective is the active involvement in a hand-on group project. Students are expected to apply investment knowledge and relevant financial empirical models taught in class to the group project. Through the whole semester, students are strongly encouraged to communicate the ongoing progress of their projects with the instructor. This learning experience should be interactive rather than passive.

While the project focuses on a particular finance subject, all discussion should be related to a global business environment, including but not limited to finance, economics, marketing, management, technology, politics, etc. Thus, enhancing a better understanding of firms business operation as well as strategic decisions making processes, students are expected to read daily business news (on paper or on internet) and particularly pay much more attention to the headline news occurred in market. At the end, students with solid performance in this course are expected to thrive in a real corporate world.

 

III. Course Organization

Course Material - The required text is

Charles Jones, "Investments, Analysis and Management", John Wiley & Songs, Inc.,

7th edition.

 

The recommended computer skill and other supplementary readings

Microsoft application (Word, Power Point and Excel)

Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Internet electronic sources (ex. Yahoo business summary, stock quotation, CBS Market Watch, CNN financial news, etc.)

All supplementary teaching material and notes will be distributed in the class. Problems solving will be demonstrated in class. In addition, text reading will be assigned in class. Since all the above requirements will be included in exams, for students missing the class, they need to ask for copies of distributed material and notes from the instructor or their classmates.

Course Evaluation

Participation

(attendance, text readings and class discussion)                                 40 points

Assignment/Quiz (each is 10 points and can drop the lowest score) 60 points

Written Project (presentaiton/30 points and paper/70 points)         100 points

Three Exams (drop the lowest score)                                         200 points

Final (Comprehensive)                                                                 150 points

Total points                                                                                 550 points

Course Policy

All drop-add policy complies with the University/College rules.

The written project can be an individual project but a group project is preferred. The maximum number of people in one group is 5.

The maximum length of the project report is 20 pages not including the tables, figures or other supplementary notes. The first page of the project report is an executive summary, which provides a brief summarized findings and conclusions.

Late project report will be penalized 40 points. Late project report is defined as the report should be submitted no latter than ONE day grace period (before 5:00 pm) after the original due date. The project report will NOT be accepted if it is submitted after this grace period.

Dates of changing exams and other information concerning exams will be announced in the class. Most importanly, instructor reserves the right to change the syllabus based on the progress made in the class.

ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY

IV. Course Outline