Investment and Finance MSc/PGDip/PGCert

Course content

What will you study on the MSc Investment and Finance?

The content of this course is designed to equip you with the essential techniques that are used in investment institutions and familiarise students with the practices that are followed in financial markets. This provides you with the opportunity to apply various models and reflect on your understanding of the prevailing concepts and theories in areas such as finance, risk management and investment.

For masters students, the dissertation gives you an opportunity to address a specific finance or investment issue of particular interest. To aid you in preparing for this project a number of dissertation workshops are delivered during the taught period and at the end of these workshops, you will be ready to submit a dissertation proposal.

There are three different awards available for this course:

• PG Certificate route comprises two 30 credit modules
• MSc route comprises two 30 credit modules, four 15 credit modules and a dissertation
• PG Diploma route comprises two 30 credit modules and four 15 credit modules

You can find more information about this course in the programme specification. Optional modules are not offered on every course. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.

This module aims to provide a rigorous grounding in the theory of finance and equip students with knowledge/techniques that are required for arriving at investment and financing decisions, enable them to identify the sources of agency problems and their effect on firm value and apply various techniques used in capital budgeting as well as evaluate financial assets and understand the theories on which asset pricing models are built. Students will critically discuss the validity of modern theories that assess the impact of financing decision on the firm value and cost of capital.

This module deals with the statistical methods and explores the application of these methods to analytical models in finance. The aim is to provide students with the analytical and programming skills necessary to pursue empirical studies in finance. The students are encouraged to use previous knowledge in statistics and computer programming.

This module aims to provide an overview of the nature and operation of international financial markets and their traded instruments. Students are introduced to the organisation of the international financial system, the markets for foreign exchanges, stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives, and the risks and opportunities offered in these markets and systems. The module prepares students with essential knowledge for their future career in business, especially in the financial sector, and supports their study of other modules.

This module aims to identify the major sources of risk involved in international economic and financial activity; develop the tools and techniques necessary to manage these risks and enable a critical appreciation of the interaction between corporate decision-making and capital market behaviour.

This module provides participants with a sound grounding in the theory and practice of investment management. Specific aims include: strategies of portfolio construction, generating investment ideas, estimating investment risk returns and the use of derivative instruments.

This module provides participants with a sound grounding in portfolio theory and equity analysis. Students are exposed to the key concepts and tools involved and further asked to apply those tools to analyse real life financial assets.

This module aims to provide students with the opportunity to bring together the knowledge and skills developed during the programme and apply them to the problems of formulation, design, execution and analysis of an original research project on a substantive financial issue. It also aims to provide an opportunity for the students to extend their knowledge of a selected topic and to apply it to the formulation and design of a substantive investigation.

You can find more information about this course in the programme specification. Optional modules are not offered on every course. If we have insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, or there are staffing changes which affect the teaching, it may not be offered. If an optional module will not run, we will advise you after the module selection period when numbers are confirmed, or at the earliest time that the programme team make the decision not to run the module, and help you choose an alternative module.