FINS3635 - Options, Futures and Risk Management 2023
Third year elective, moderately easy assignments, pretty poorly managed tbh and is one of the more mathematical finance courses.
Ease: 8/10.
This course is not hard, you just need to learn the formulas and you'll be good.
Content: 6/10.
Content was not particularly interesting, a lot of crossover with FINS3635, went into things like options pricing, estimating volatility, pricing swaps, optimal hedging strategies and that kinda thing. Not many proofs involved, more so just do the questions in the tutorials/textbook. Huge difference between the first half and second half of the course, but that was due to different lecturers, where the latter half was much more disorganised. Powerpoint slides which look like a child made them, poorly formatted excel workbooks, no tutorial questions given ("read the textbook and do da questions"), it was the complete antithesis of what $1,800 dollars should buy you. First half was really well done
thanks Zonghe.
Lecturer 1: Zonghe
9/10. Put a lot of effort into making polished and concise slides which summarised the core material beautifully. Provided a well structured and organised midterm exam, really the only downsides was his lack of explanation around the assignment (I get it, it needs to be a real-world scenario and we have to figure out everything blah blah), and an inclusion of a topic which was taken out of the syllabus.
Lecturer 2: MHJ
0/10. This is my primary motivation for making this post, I want there to be some sort of documentation on the internet about the enigma that is MHJ. Triple PHD, superstar associate professor, my first exposure to him was in an ACCT1501 class, and upon hearing his bizarre fake english accent ranting on for the first time, I was wondering if I was watching a professional satirist filming a mockumentary. For this course, here are some of the highlights of his teachings:
- Speaks with a posh accent which does not exist (pronounces words like "average" as "aRverage", "Nasdaq" as "NaRsdaRq", and rolls every 'r' like he's a crocodile doing a death roll).
- This was incredibly distracting throughout his lectures
- Needlessly makes his sentences fancy instead of emphasising clarity
- Example: "These coefficients sum up to 1" to "I'll add a constraint since these coefficients tautologically must sum up to 1"
- For assignment 2, he adds in the exact same topic which was taken out of the syllabus and told no one until the day before it was due. There was literally an announcement about the midterm question being taken out, and somehow, he thought it would be appropriate to include this. Shout out to anyone who figured out we were supposed to use the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model, and not any drift stuff.
Edit: more additional highlights of his shenanigans
- He was impossible to reach out to via any form of communication: teams, email, phone, course discussion board. I get that you're busy and that you're on multiple company boards or whatever, but this is your job, and you should fulfil such obligations. He also maintained a YouTube channel side hustle (Finance Mark), which he was daily uploading to during this time, despite never having such time to properly manage our course.
- He unironically said he hoped we found the course was "positive NPV".
- He had a self-portrait of himself in the background, which also detracted from his teaching. If you look at his YouTube videos, you'll see what I mean, there's even some elephant humans standing in the painting.
- He included Excel into the final exam as a very last minute announcement. No precedent for this in any course, we weren't led to believe this would happen, he just said have Excel ready.
- His prekindergarten level PowerPoint slides which used Calibri font and had terrible formatting.
For actual teaching, he was absolutely useless, nothing more to be said. If you ever have the opportunity to witness him teach. please do, you won't regret it.
Tutorial: N/A.
Personally, I found the course was ok if you're a competent human being who knows maths. As such, this course will not be difficult for you, however, I can see how someone who doesn't really like quantitative stuff might not fair so well with this. It was the mismanagement in the latter half of the course (and hence the final), which I particularly disliked and would be the primary reason why someone would want to avoid doing it.
