Investments Course 108 Description

Here's the Interactive Investments Course you'll take Online at your pace. This course uses the same text the best universities use, the fourth edition of "Investments" by Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, and Alan J. Marcus (ISBN 0256246262) published 1998. This text serves as the structure for investment courses offered at Harvard, Brown, University of California, Boston College, Boston University, and other top universities.

In response to popular demand, we've developed this investments course to be delivered directly to the student via email. Our belief is that investor knowledge is the most critical ingredient in determining your future financial success. Investing in your knowledge will give you an edge on the market you'll carry the rest of your life. The Investor Investments Course benefits include the use of course content and resources that are second to none, a cost that is a small fraction of the tuition you would pay for an in-class-attendance course, and the flexibility to complete the course on your own schedule. You will receive an achievement certificate upon satisfactory completion of all course requirements. 

Here's the authors' philosophy: In teaching and practice, the field of investments has experienced many changes over the last two decades. This is due in part to an abundance of newly designed securities, in part to the creation of new trading strategies that would have been impossible without concurrent advances in computer technology, and in part to rapid advances in the theory of investments that have come out of the academic community. In no other field, perhaps, is the transmission of theory to real-world practice as rapid as is now commonplace in the financial industry. These developments place new burdens on practitioners and teachers of investments far beyond what was required only a short while ago. 

Investments, Fourth Edition, is intended primarily as a textbook for courses in investment analysis. Our guiding principle has been to present the material in a framework that is organized by a central core of consistent fundamental principles. We make every attempt to strip away unnecessary mathematical and technical detail, and we have concentrated on providing the intuition that may guide students and practitioners as they confront new ideas and challenges in their professional lives.  

Our primary goal is to present material of practical value, but all three of us are active researchers in the science of financial economics and find virtually all of the material in this book to be of great intellectual interest. Fortunately, we think, there is no contradictions in the field of investments between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of money. Quite the opposite. The capital asset pricing model, the arbitrage pricing model, the efficient markets hypothesis, the option-pricing model, and the other centerpieces of modern financial research are as much intellectually satisfying subjects of scientific inquiry as they are of immense practical importance for the sophisticated investor. 

In our effort to link theory to practice, we have attempted to make our approach consistent with that of the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts (ICFA), a subsidiary of the Association of Investment Management and Research (AIMR). In addition to fostering research in finance, the AIMR and ICFA administer an education and certification program to candidates seeking the title of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). The CFA curriculum represents the consensus of a committee of distinguished scholars and practitioners regarding the core of knowledge required by the investment professional. 

There are many features of this text that make it consistent with and relevant to the CFA curriculum. The end-of-chapter problems sets contain questions from past CFA exams, and, for students who will be taking the exam, Appendix B is a useful tool that lists each CFA question in the text and the exam from which it has been taken. Chapter 3 includes excerpts from the "Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct" of the ICFA. Chapter 26, which discusses investors and the investment process, and is modeled after the ICFA outline. 

Zvi Bodie is Professor of Finance at Boston University School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served on the finance faculty at Harvard University and at MIT. He currently serves as a member of the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on pension finance, the management of financial guarantees in both the private and public sector, and investment strategy in an inflationary environment. He has coedited several books on pensions, including Securing Employer Pensions: An International Perspective, Pensions and the Economy: Sources, Uses and Limitations of Data, Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. His research on pensions has focused on the funding and investment policies of private pension insurance. He has consulted on pension policy for the U.S. Department of Labor, the State of Israel, and Bankers Trust Co.

Alex Kane is Professor of finance and economics at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He was visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo; Graduate School of Business, Harvard; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; and research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. An author of many articles in finance and management journals, Professor Kane's research is mainly in corporate finance, portfolio management, and capital markets, most recently in the measurement of market volatility and pricing of options. Professor Kane is the developer of the International Simulation Laboratory (ISL) for training and experimental research in executive decision making.

Alan Marcus is Professor of finance and chairman of the finance department in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1981. Professor Marcus recently has been a visiting professor at the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration and at MIT's Sloan School of Management and has served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also established the Chartered Financial Analysis Review Program at Boston College. Professor Marcus has published widely in the fields of capital markets and portfolio management, with an emphasis on applications of futures and options pricing models. His consulting work has ranged from new product development to provision of expert testimony in utility rate proceedings. He also spent two years at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), where he developed models of mortgage pricing and credit risk, and he currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Currency Risk Management Alliance of State Street Bank and Windham Capital Management Boston.

The course presentation format will consist of required text readings, staff and investment industry guest lecturers delivered via email, and selected problems with multiple choice answers incorporating interactive instructional feedback. Each problem session must be successfully completed in order to advance to the next session. On completion of all sessions, a certificate will be issued.

The entire process is completed on your own schedule.

The simple registration process will be presented to you from our secure server.

 If you prefer, you may register by mailing your Name, postal address, email address, and $48.00 tuition fee to:

The Investor, Inc.
Course Registration
P.O. Box 2284
Taunton, MA 02780  

Please make your check payable to "The Investor, Inc."  

We look forward to your participation!