| Overview of Capital Markets · 3 sessions |
| 1a |
Markets 1Overview of Financial Markets |
- What financial markets are and why they exist
- The major asset classes, participants, and primary vs. secondary markets
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- A brief history of asset management: key milestones from mutual funds to index funds, ETFs, passive, and private markets
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| 1b |
Markets 2Investing |
- How investing works in practice: returns, compounding, the risk-return trade-off
- The investor's basic problem
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- Payment for order flow: how "free" trading gets paid for, and who the real customer is
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| 2a |
Markets 3Securities and Valuations |
- The main security types and how each is valued
- Valuation by discounted cash flow; arbitrage and the law of one price
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- ADRs: how a foreign stock trades in the US, and the arbitrage tying the receipt to its home listing
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| Fixed Income Securities · 6 sessions |
| 2b |
Fixed Income 1Bond Pricing and Interest Rates |
- Pricing a bond as the present value of its cash flows
- Yields, coupons vs. zeros, and the price-yield relationship
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- Application to PE #1 — PME: benchmarking a private-equity fund by discounting its cash flows against public markets (pure time value)
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| 3a |
Fixed Income 2Interest Rate Risk |
- How bond prices move with rates; duration as sensitivity
- The term structure and the yield curve
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- Trading the yield curve: how investors position for curve shifts (steepeners, flatteners) and what the curve implies
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| 3b |
Fixed Income 3Managing Rate Risk (Part 1) |
- Duration and convexity as risk measures
- Hedging interest-rate exposure; immunization
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- Banking: bank asset-liability management and how duration mismatch shows up (the SVB pattern)
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| 4a |
Fixed Income 4Managing Rate Risk (Part 2) |
- Portfolio immunization and convexity adjustments
- Practical hedging of a bond book
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- Insurance: how insurers immunize long-dated liabilities, duration matching and LDI
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| 4b |
Fixed Income 5Fed and Monetary Policy |
- How the Fed sets policy and moves the short rate
- Transmission to the yield curve and to asset prices
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- FOMC meeting (8×/year, guaranteed): read a live statement and reprice bonds off the rate decision
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| 5a |
Fixed Income 6Not-so-fixed Income |
- Beyond default-free bonds: credit risk and spreads
- Floating-rate and other "not-so-fixed" instruments
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- Application to PE #2 — private credit: the rise of direct lending, and how it differs from bank loans and public bonds
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| Portfolio Choice · 3 sessions |
| 5b |
Portfolio Choice 1Equity Valuation |
- Valuing stocks: dividend-discount and multiples
- Linking price to expected cash flows and the discount rate
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- Application to PE #3 — valuing a portfolio company: DCF and comps, NAV marks, and the J-curve
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| 6a |
Portfolio Choice 2Portfolio Optimization (Part 1) |
- Risk and return of portfolios; diversification
- Mean-variance analysis and the efficient frontier
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- Information overload: walk through the actual list of data, feeds, and tools investors have, to show how hard an edge really is
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| 6b |
Portfolio Choice 3Portfolio Optimization (Part 2) |
- The capital allocation line and the tangency portfolio
- Adding the risk-free asset; the optimal allocation
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- Aschenbrenner's blowup: 4x-levered AI bets, a 67% July loss, and the fire-sale to Citadel, leverage plus concentration equals risk of ruin
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| The CAPM · 2 sessions |
| 7a |
CAPM 1Market Portfolio |
- From optimal portfolios to equilibrium: the market portfolio
- Beta and systematic vs. idiosyncratic risk
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- Passive ownership: if everyone just holds the index, who is left to set prices?
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| 7b |
CAPM 2Applications |
- Using the CAPM: cost of equity and cost of capital
- The security market line; judging expected returns
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- Cost of capital: use the CAPM to back out a firm's cost of equity / WACC from a real deal or analyst valuation
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| Beyond the CAPM · 3 sessions |
| 8a |
Beyond CAPM 1Anomalies and Alpha |
- Where the CAPM fails: anomalies and alpha
- What "beating the market" actually means
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- Alpha or risk? Take a claimed "free money" strategy and ask whether it is real alpha or a compensated risk
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| 8b |
Beyond CAPM 2Factor Investing (Part 1) |
- Multifactor models: size, value, momentum
- The Fama-French lens
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- Smart-beta ETF: unpack a real one, what factor is it selling, and does the premium survive?
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| 9a |
Beyond CAPM 3Factor Investing (Part 2) |
- Building and evaluating factor portfolios
- Factor timing and factor crashes
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- The factor zoo: are there really hundreds of factors, or is most of it data-mining?
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| Funds · 3 sessions |
| 9b |
Funds 1Investment Landscape |
- The fund universe: mutual funds, ETFs, hedge funds, private funds
- Active vs. passive, and fees
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- Financial regulation: what the '33 and '34 Acts require, and the legal routes (Reg D, 12(g)) firms use to stay outside them
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| 10a |
Funds 2Skill vs. Luck (Part 1) |
- Measuring manager performance: Sharpe, alpha, information ratio
- Separating skill from luck
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- Buffett vs. Cathie Wood: is alpha real or just factor exposure? Decompose Buffett via "Buffett's Alpha," then the ARK contrast where factor attribution breaks down
- Two track records side by side: one long, one short, can you tell skill from luck?
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| 10b |
Funds 3Skill vs. Luck (Part 2) |
- Persistence of performance and survivorship bias
- Evaluating track records rigorously
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- The democratization-of-PE debate: should private markets be opened to retail investors? (picks up the Reg D thread from Funds 1)
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| Behavioral Finance · 2 sessions |
| 11a |
Behavioral Finance 1Biases |
- Systematic investor biases
- How they show up in prices
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- Meme-stock episode: walk through one and name the bias driving it
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| 11b |
Behavioral Finance 2Limits to Arbitrage |
- Why smart money can't always correct mispricing
- The limits to arbitrage
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- MicroStrategy's persistent premium to the Bitcoin it holds, why short-MSTR / long-BTC keeps failing
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| Taxes · 1 session |
| 12a |
TaxesTaxes and Tax Strategies |
- Tax-aware investing: capital gains, tax-loss harvesting, asset location
- Municipal bonds and tax-equivalent yield
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- Tax-loss harvesting: offsetting gains with losses, wash-sale rules, and the value of tax-aware trading
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| Course Wrap-Up · 1 session |
| 12b |
Course Wrap-UpSynthesis |
- Valuation and portfolio management as one framework
- Where markets stand today
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