More about SMIP

Course Highlights

Career Directed: Earlier in the Spring 2002 term, the Finance Department did a survey of students.  One of the points that the students made was that they would like more courses that prepare them for jobs.  The SMIP course has exactly this objective.  Here's some information on what a career in Equity Analysis involves and links to other related career sites.

 Integrative: In other courses, you may have been exposed to various concepts and tools, such as market efficiency, discounted cash-flow analysis, financial statement analysis, capital structure, and regression.  In this course, you see how these concepts/tools can be used in a very practical context – to construct a portfolio that will do better than a passive investment strategy. 

 Problem-based approach: One of the special things about this course is that all these concepts and tools are brought in when they are needed, and taught in an interactive manner – both in the classroom, as well as in one-on-one or group discussions.

 Participation of Experts: In addition to class meetings and group work, class participants also have the benefit of industry experts.  For example, in the Spring term, we had several outside visitors, both portfolio managers and stock analysts.  Among our visitors were:

• Mr. Jason Graybill of Abner, Herman & Brock Asset Management

• Professor Aswath Damodaran of New York University

• Mr. Jack Salzman of Kings Point Partners

Click here to see a presentation by Professor Damodaran on Discounted Cash Flow Analysis.  

Participation in Conferences: Three of our students also made subsidized visits to an annual Student Investment conference in Dayton, Ohio.  Here's Robert Candella's detailed report on the Spring 2002 conference, with a lot of advice from Street analysts; and here's another report prepared by Oren Bossin and Howard Weiss.   Several students also had an opportunity to participate in the Corporate Earnings Analysis Seminar, organized by the Center for Investment Research and Institutional Investor Journals. 

Stock Analyst Reports by Course Participants