Investment Management Diploma

Major Description

• The Diploma in Investment Management is aimed at professionals currently in the market wanting to expand their theoretical knowledge base, as well as individuals with other qualifications or experience wanting to enter the financial markets.
• Graduates of the program are expected to be competent to handle not only the common investment transactional matters but as well to assist an investment analyst in managing investment reports.

Course Description

1. Investment Management
• Investing is a process that involves anticipating future outcomes based on information and knowledge that exist today. By analyzing past performance and other relevant information pertaining to an investment opportunity, you can make calculated predictions of how that opportunity will perform in the future. This course shows you how this process works and how you can apply rational techniques to assess risk and make good investment decisions. Topics include accounting practices and principles, financial analysis techniques, evaluating information sources and their relevancy, evaluating and managing risk, valuation, and pools of funds and their objectives.
2. Technical analysis
• The course aims to provide students with a sound understanding of technical analysis techniques. Technical analysis is a method of analyzing stocks or other assets and forming strategies of buying and selling these assets. The primary emphasis will be focused on providing students with a solid foundation of the traditional as well as modern techniques of finding trends and cycles in financial markets and understanding the trading strategies involved. The course also aims to introduce and familiarized students to the main practical tools of technical analysis and their application to various markets.
3. Econometric Methods in Investment Analysis
• Econometrics is a young science. It developed during the previous century and primarily after World War II. Econometrics is the unification of statistics, economic theory and mathematics. Econometrics is a branch of economics that seeks to measure and correlate the relationships among economic variables. It combines economic theory expressed in mathematical form with statistical methods. It helps in forecasting economic indicators, assist in evaluating effects of policies both before and after implementation, and examine or prove an economic theory. The main objective of econometrics is to identify a causal effect of one or more variables (independent) on another variable (dependent).
4. Asset & Portfolio Management
• The importance of good portfolio management is more evident during periods of market volatility and uncertainty. While acknowledging the contribution of elegant intellectual constructs such as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), this course will be far more pragmatic in applying academic theory to real world investment decisions. Through lectures, case studies, and exercises, participants will:
• become familiar with appropriate measures of both risk and return when evaluating portfolio performance.
• Appreciate more fully the importance of asset allocation.
• Gain a historical perspective on how different investment styles (growth, value, large cap, small cap, indexing) perform over time.
5. Corporate Finance
• This introductory course is designed to give participants a practical understanding of the basic concepts of corporate finance. Topics to be covered include Time Value of Money, NPV/IRR, Project Evaluation, Free cash flow, Risk/Return and Cost of Capital, Alternative Valuation Methods, Capital Structures and deal financing. It will benefit new entrants to investment banking, equity research, trading, commercial banking, credit analysis, debt research or trading, corporate analysis, strategic planning and project finance. This course will benefit those who have no corporate finance background, who wish to move into the area and take on more responsibility.
6. Managerial Accounting
• Management accounting systems provide an organization with data used in making operating decisions, achieving cost control, measuring performance, motivating employees and managing external relationships. This multiplicity of roles imposes conflicting demands that imply a trade off in optimal system. This trade off is underscored by emphasizing the interdependency between organizational structure, planning and control. In addition, the course focuses on the understanding of the demand for and the usefulness of management accounting information to manage an organizational unit through effective analysis.