Friday, October 22, 2010

Bond Valuation Class

I just finished up with a course on bond valuation at the U of M. If I end up passing, I'll have two classes left to finish my MBA.


The first thing you learn about taking a class on bond valuation is that you should never take a class on bond valuation. For those of us not in finance, time value of money is tough enough. Toss in trying to value static spreads, forward rates, and locked in arbitrage opportunities, we're thrown for all kind of loops.

The professor was not only a professor, but the head of finance at Carlson. He was a very good teacher, but gave us more work than a full-time working father/husband cared for. Five homeworks (hard homework), three quizzes, two group homeworks, five short papers (really short) and a final. All for a seven week class. Seemed a bit demanding to me, but I struggled through it.

My next class is on business writing, which should prove to be far less demanding than calculating the yield to maturity using treasury spot rates. Lets at least hope so.

2 comments:

Scooter said...

Stephen Wilbers (for the writing class)?

Mac Noland said...

Sandra Smith. A pretty good teacher.