Many CBS students, especially those in the EMBA program that I have had the chance of working with in TA capacity, have reached out to me in the last few weeks asking for advice on what investing courses I recommend them to take in the Spring 2023 semester.
This is indeed an important question: with 150+ finance and investing courses being offered at Columbia, there is a lot to choose from and the wide range of selections can be overwhelming.
So, in this note, I provide an overview of some of the courses I have taken (or know about) and hopefully this will help you make a more educated decision.
Below, you will find some of the courses that I recommend: this section includes a high-level one-line overview. I will then provide a more detailed overview about some of these courses.
Overview of recommended courses (General List of Courses)
- Restructuring and LBO by Michael Grad – it’s a primer for learning about distressed space and credit in general. If you want to take Distressed Value Investing, taking this course first helps.
- Distressed Value Investing – Michael Gatto’s course focuses on the identifying trades and Dan Kruger’s course focuses more on the distressed process.
- Value Investing in private credit – This is a great course for learning about the day-to-day job of credit people and all exercises are real-life actual tasks of a credit analyst.
- Value Investing across Capital Structure – Lot of work but with a passionate professor who shows you great real opportunities.
- Debt Markets – hard course with quizzes but everyone was so pleased by it.
- Applied Value Investing: I took it with Arnaud Ajdler – I learned so much from him – he is a no BS guy and very to the point. Classic VI.
- Short selling – a lot of work but with Jaime Lester who is a well-known short-seller (previously with Einhorn at Greenlight Capital).
- Advanced Corp. Finance with John Moon. 12 valuations (one per week) besides the regular lectures…you exercise valuing convertible bonds, Contingent Value Rights, IPOs, Share Buyback impacts, ship valuation etc.
- M&A. Great course about the process of merger (what happens first, then what etc.).
- Value Investing with Legends: Lots of famous people coming and talking…not much deep coursework but more of point of view.
- Security Analysis. This is a good course and goes deeper than applied value investing into analyzing companies.
- Earning Quality: Accounting course more focused on uncovering shenanigans in BS and Income Statement.
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More Detailed Overview (Spring 2023)
Advanced Corporate Finance (John Moon)
I took this course with full-timers and the instructor for the course was John Moon. There is an EMBA version of the course which I think is 50% easier and 50% less workload.
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Side Note:
During my time at CBS, I mixed and match courses between full-time and EMBA programs. The goal was simple: follow the best professors and courses and try to get in no matter when they teach. That’s the reason I took Advanced Corporate Finance with John Moon.
I learned a ton following the above principle: but my priority was learning as much as possible via achieving academic excellence. YOU NEED TO DECIDE what your priority is given the family and work constraints that you might have and plan accordingly (something I believe you already know).
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John Moon is a managing director in Morgan Stanley and is Head of Morgan Stanley Energy Partners (MSEP) which is the energy PE arm of Morgan Stanley.
He is very sharp and energetic and relatively strict: there are 12 sessions in the course and for each session, you need to do a case which is essentially a valuation. The cases need to be done in groups.
I was part of a group with Mexican candidate coming from PE background in his first semester who helped to some extent and two more candidates who already had job offers and didn’t care at all (almost no contribution).
Structurally, John Moon lectures about a series of topics in the first 1.5 hour of the class and the remainder is spent discussing the case.
As a result, I had to do almost all the cases which turned out to be a good thing because I learned so much: each valuation exercise was about something different. I had to value Share Buybacks, Ships, convertible bonds, Contingent Value Rights (CVRs), IPOs and more.
Structurally, John Moon lectures about a series of topics in the first 1.5 hour of the class and the remainder is spent discussing the case. There is loose relationship between case topics and lecture materials. For example, I had to teach myself how to develop a model for valuing convertible bonds (this one was not that hard) because the lectures are about different topics such as Agency theories and so on.
Moon has a nice habit of planning a series of lunches in advance: students can sign up in this lunch sessions. They are usually held in restaurants close to Morgan Stanley HQ and John Moon pays. They are great opportunity to discuss many different topis from politics to global geopolitics, macro events and course topics. I really appreciated John Moon’s effort in organizing this (very kind of him to do it).
From students angle, you kind of need to be a bit cocky to take this course after taking Corporate Finance and Capital Markets and many students in the class were like that. I would say the mix of students in the class was very smart “when it came to finance topics” and this led to discussions being a bit more advanced.
Overall, a great course and one of my top 5 courses in CBS – you need to work a lot in this one and if you don’t have time or don’t want to go deep, take the MEBA version or don’t take this course as it’s demanding and the professor is less forgiving.
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To be continued: Next part will be added tomorrow December 15, 2022