This course provides candidates with the legal background necessary to comply with the regulatory requirements in banking and finance. It covers the legal aspects of corporate governance, the legal framework of banking and finance, and financial products, including derivatives. This course also provides candidates with background on market access in financial services, as China embarks on liberalisation of its financial markets as a member of the WTO.

This course covers bank management techniques that include asset and liability management, liquidity and reserve management, credit analysis, loan pricing and off-balance-sheet banking, as well as regulatory issues of commercial banks. It also discusses issues related to mortgage loan products and how real estate risks may affect the market value of mortgages.

Hedge funds are one of the fastest growing sectors of asset management. This course studies the styles of hedge funds and management strategies from an investment decision-making perspective. Topics covered in this module include environment and micro-structure of capital market, investment strategies, quantitative tools, derivative products, investment performance evaluation and discussions of some hedge funds failures. Special attention is given to various practical investment strategies and their risks, including equity selection techniques, market-neutral portfolio constructions, arbitrage strategies, emerging market investment, shortselling problems, etc.

Behavioral finance uses insights from psychology to understand how biases, heuristics, framing and emotions influences the decisions of individual and professional investors, markets and managers. It describes how and why these suboptimal decisions might deviate from those predicted by traditional financial or economic theory. The course also shows why arbitrageurs such as hedge funds cannot correct but instead choose to ride on the misbehavior and mispricing. The course will explore the implications of investor psychology and limitation to arbitrage in the individual trading behaviors, aggregate stock market and the cross-section of average returns, and corporate finance. How insights of behavioral finance complement the traditional finance paradigm will be examined, so that candidates will gain an understanding of how individuals and institutions actually make financial decisions (descriptive) and guidance on how to improve financial decision making (prescriptive) in themselves and others.

A real option is a right—not an obligation—to take an action on an underlying real asset. The action may involve, for example, abandoning, expanding, or contracting a project or even deferring the decision until a later time. Real options analysis (ROA) is a tool that helps to quantify the value of a real option. This course provides a synthesis of modern asset pricing and corporate finance via the framework of ROA. The course compares and contrasts ROA with the traditional tools of valuation. The benefits and limitations of ROA in terms of practical applications are also discussed.

This course provides students with the foundations and practical knowledge enabling them to launch and manage their own entrepreneurial venture including a hedge fund, private equity, venture capital or asset management firm. Taught as a combination of practical classes and guest lectures by industry professionals, the course covers the entire fund and business launch spectrum including fund structuring, investor capital raising, investor due diligence, regulatory, tax, governance, fund terms, private placement regulations, market trading rules, service provider selection, counterparty selection, employment matters, real estate, technology, operations, etc. The course also covers the investor landscape and investor lifecycle from early stage investors to institutional capital raising from global family offices, fund of funds, endowments, private banks and pension funds. We also cover the ongoing management and deal making of such funds from angel and venture capital early investments to private equity deals and exits. The course also discusses the global trends and industry institutional best practices, the customs and usage in the industry as well as some of the future trends, including FinTech and cybersecurity, and their impact on the industry. This is a very practical course with a heavy emphasis on the latest industry trends and best practices rather than theoretical concepts.

This course gives candidates an overview of Asian financial markets, their latest development and future trends so that candidates can better prepare themselves for building their career in finance in the region. It consists of company visits, executive talks/seminars, training, networking and/or cultural activities.

This is a special course that deals with various current topics in finance. Topics covered may vary from year to year, depending on the research interests of the instructor.

The world of global finance, banking and financial services is changing rapidly with the emergence of start-up financial technologies, commonly referred to as FinTech that may disrupt the status quo. Taught as a series of practical courses (and potentially also guest lectures by industry entrepreneurs and professionals), the course covers the main pillars of the FinTech start-up ecosystem in the US as well as Asia, including peer to peer lending platforms, internet finance, online finance, bitcoin, digital currencies, digital payments, big data, cybersecurity, cryptography, etc and their practical impact on global banking and finance. This course will provide students with the latest empowering and practical knowledge on FinTech enabling them to understand some of the FinTech changes taking place currently in the financial services industry and, most importantly, the trends that will impact the industry in the future. This is a very practical course with a heavy emphasis on team projects (and potentially also guest lectures) on the latest industry trends and best practices by industry experts and entrepreneurs.

This course aims to provide students with a practical approach to equity valuation and investing. They will learn how to apply the key concepts, techniques and tools used by market practitioners in making real world investment decisions. Topics include: identifying sources of value, core valuation techniques - discounted cash flow, multiples analysis of comparable companies, real options valuation, and other valuation methods commonly used by practitioners; an overview of the asset management industry; the fundamental assumptions and approaches to value investing; risk management in the investment process.

This course covers the main elements of natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, and text mining, providing students with a foundation in collecting, managing, and analyzing textual data with financial applications in mind such as FinTech. Examples of potential applications include understanding and responding to sentiment in financial newspapers and social media, using social media to improve performance in asset/investment management, due diligence, Fed watching, monitoring of company events, and detecting insider trading. Although students write their own computer programmes in this course, they are not required to implement most algorithms from scratch. Instead, the focus of this course is on how to use existing state-of-the-art open-source software libraries and how to apply them in a financial context. This course consists of three parts. In the first part, we work with real-world textual data sets to obtain proficiency in collecting, importing, organizing, and cleaning textual data from sources related to finance and FinTech. Among others, we cover web scraping, textual corpora, text processing, tokenization, stemming, and stop word removal. In the second part we delve into a more detailed analysis of NLP, text analytics, and machine learning with a particular focus on finance and FinTech. For instance, we examine bag-of-words, word weighting schemes, document classification, document clustering, sentiment analysis, and topic models. The third part consists of summarizing, displaying, and visualizing results obtained from NLP and text analytics for applications in finance and FinTech.

This course aims to cover basic information and knowledge about project choice and financing, idea implementation, decision-making, and innovations in start-up businesses. The majority of such information and knowledge is delivered based on the case method (with supplementary lecture notes when appropriate). It is noteworthy that we will take two roles interchangeably throughout this course: the entrepreneurs who seek funding and the venture capitalists who seek good projects. Understanding the role of both important players in the entrepreneurial finance process helps us have an objective evaluation and unbiased assessment of potential ideas and projects.

This is a special course that deals with various current topics in financial technology. Topics covered may vary from year to year, depending on the research interests of the instructor.

The course aims to examine questions on different aspects of a modern full-service bank, including how it makes profit in each of the main business areas, as well as the main risks that it faces and how it manages those risks. The course focuses on financial statement analysis and also analyzing the accounting and disclosure rules for financial instruments, in order to reveal the strategies followed by the bank given the various regulations under which it operates.

This course will empower students with all the fundamentals to understand the digital assets ecosystem including Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, stable coins, utility tokens (e.g. Ethereum), decentralized finance (DeFi), central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), security tokens, the metaverse, web 3.0 and many others.