The links on this page send you to various sites with teaching related material.
Courses I teach:
I currently teach three courses. One is a masters' level online, asynchronous course called Financial Risk Management. Another is a doctoral seminar called Quantitative Finance and Derivative Pricing. I also teach an undergraduate special topics course called Risk and the Psychology of Finance. If you have any questions about teaching such courses and would like some advice, please shoot me an email.
Here is a general descripton of hte courses I teach.
FIN 3910: Special Topics:
Risk and the Psychology of Finance
This course is essentially a course in
decision making under risk. Taught as a seminar for undergraduates, enrollment
is limited to 20-22 students. The course is delivered online via Zoom in a
synchronous manner, one day a week for two back -to-back 1-hour, 20-minute
sessions. The course uses no textbooks, nor does it have any exams, but there
are a substantial number of readings and more than 20 writing assignments. Most
are small but one is a research project requiring a paper and presentation in
which the student chooses someone who had to make a critical decision at some
time in history. Hence, the student can select some famous historical figure and
event and analyze it from a risk-return perspective. . A significant amount of
class participation is required to secure a good grade in this course. The
course focuses on building an understanding of the psychology of making
decisions under risk. While financial decisions are clearly important decisions
under risk, the course studies decisions that are common in life more generally,
such as those involving health, sports, , gambling, and business to enable the
student to understand the broader processes that make for good decision making.
We frequently identify the human biases that lead to poor decision making and we
look at the effect of luck in decision making. Each semester there are three
outstanding guest speakers who will share their life experiences in making tough
decisions. This cours is available for undergraduate students in any academic
discipline.
FIN 7400: Financial Risk Management
This course is offered online, asynchronously, which means no class meetings,
with the material delivered entirely by video. The course is the study of how
financial risk is identified and managed. Requirements include a mid-term and
final exam, a risk management project, and participation in weekly online forums
that deal with contemporary topics in risk management. The course uses a book
that I wrote called Financial Risk Management:
An End User Perspective (Singapore:
World Scientific Press, 2019). As the title indicates, the course is
from the end user’s point of view, meaning that if focuses on buyers of risk
management products, who are ordinarily at a severe disadvantage relative to
sellers. Such buyers would be corporations and non-profits. This buy-side
perspective contrasts with the sell-side perspective, which refers to the
financial institutions that offer these products. The aforementioned project
involves taking the perspective of a risk management consulting firm in
developing a real-world prospective buy-side client. This course is available
for masters’ students in finance as well as full-time, part-time, professional,
executive, and online MBA students. Qualified students can also come from STEM
fields as well as economics and accounting.
FIN 7720: The Process and
Methodology of Research
This doctoral seminar focuses on gaining an advanced and yet fundamental
understanding of stochastic models in derivative pricing. It uses my book
Foundations of the Pricing of Financial Derivatives:
Theory and Analysis (New York:
John Wiley, 2024), co-authored with Robert Brooks. The course is
delivered online synchronously via Zoom and meets one day a week for two 1-hour,
20-minute back-to-back sessions. Requirements include class participation,
student presentations of some of the material, and a small research project
using OptionMetrics data. We build the stochastic foundations of option pricing
models, including not only the celebrated Black-Scholes-Merton model but also a
model based on arithmetic Brownian motion. We cover European, American, and some
exotic options, term structure models, and numerical methods, as well as
forwards, futures, and swaps. The course is designed primarily for finance
students but virtually any student from STEM fields is qualified to take this
course. In the past students form chemistry, engineering, data science, and
mathematics have taken this course.
Teaching Notes
The following items are called Teaching Notes. These are short technical notes in pdf format. I use them to fill in material not covered or not adequately covered in a specific book I might be using. Every effort has been made to ensure typographical and technical accuracy, but no guarantees are made. If you find any errors, please let me know. The naming convention yy-xx is based on the year that I first wrote the document and the order in which it was written that year. Thus, TN99-03 was the third document written in 1999.
SPECIAL FOR THOSE WANTING TO LEARN DERIVATIVES: These notes are in the order in which I wrote them and do not build on each other. Go to this page for a suggested course of study that tells you which order you should read these notes if you are using them to learn derivatives in general.
(FONT PROBLEMS? Many of these files were created when I used WordPerfect. I then converted them to Word but in some cases, they retained old fonts from WordPerfect. You may have trouble reading some of these due to font difficulties. If you do, please let me know (dchance@lsu.edu) and I will fix it.)
REMOVAL OF SOME ITEMS: Quite a few of these pdfs have been removed as they are now incorporated into a book that is in progress. Sorry, but I feel I have to protect my intellectural capital. The links have been removed so no need to click on them. If you are interested in the topic, it will be covered in a forthcoming book.
These items were written for my MBA introductory course in finance. They are designed to supplement and elaborate on certain material that is not covered adequately in the text. I may add some more from time to time. These notes are distinguished from the ones above by the fact that these are relatively non-technical in comparison to those above.
*MBATN08-01 (Calculating Your Wealth) has been removed because I now use it as a presentation during our MBA orientation. If you are interested in this case and spreadsheet, email me at dchance@lsu.edu. MBATN08-03 has also been removed.
Other Useful Information
Last updated: October 6 2023