Global Portfolio Investment Management

Course Description:
This course familiarizes students with major principles of international investments and
global asset allocation. It focuses on recent theoretical and practical developments in
modeling and predicting global asset returns covering both unconditional and conditional
approaches in asset pricing. It also discusses main approaches to stock selection, style
investing, and special issues in international investments such as indirect diversification and
country and industry effects in equity pricing.
The main purpose of the course is to help students develop their own top-down portfolio
management skills as well as basic understanding of the bottom-up investment approach. A
non-separable part of the course is to learn how to use Datastream and other financial data
sources. To succeed in this course, a student must have both good economic intuition and
descent quantitative skills.

Course Materials:
Required: Course packet available at the Bronfman Copy Center. It contains articles mainly
from the leading finance practitioners’ journals such as Financial Analysts Journal,
Journal of Investment Management, and Journal of Portfolio Management.
Recommended: International Investments, 5-th edition, by Bruno Solnik and Dennis
McLeavey, Pearson Addison Wesley, 2003.
© Sergei Sarkissian 1999-2008

Grading:

Participation 15% (5% passive, 10% active)
Two Quizzes 20% (10% each)
Group Assignment 1 15%
Group Assignment 2 20%
Group Assignment 3 20%
Class Presentation 10%

General Policy:
Your physical presence in class will guarantee you only one-third of your participation grade:
the rest is based on your active participation. I will be assigning several students every class
session to formally take a leading participation role for the next class. Everyone however is
expected to be well prepared for each class discussion. Your participation on a pre-specified
day will account for half of your active participation portion of the grade. The remaining half
should come from your active but constructive participation in class.
Group assignments are due at the beginning of class. No late assignments will be accepted.
Groups should consist of four or five people. The group composition must be known by the
end of the second week of classes and remain unchanged after that. After the formation of the
group, one of its members should e-mail me the list of all people in the group and their e-mail
addresses. The first assignment consists of two parts. There are two options for the second
assignment. There are two 30-minute close book close note quizzes.
Each group will have to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their third assignment. At most
two group members should deliver the presentation. During the presentation all group
members must be ready to provide reasonable responses to the questions from the audience
about their work. I will evaluate the presentation by its style, clarity, organization and the
quality of answers to the questions from the audience.

Honor Code:
Since there are no major exams that would fully determine the level of understanding of the
course material of individual students, group assignments must be completed solely by the
members of the group. Cross-group work is not allowed. Moreover, similar assignments have
been offered before at McGill and other universities. Any use of information from previous
assignments is prohibited. Failure to respect this rule constitutes dishonesty and is a direct
violation of the University Honor Code.
Group Participation Evaluation:
After the completion of each assignment, each student is required to submit the “Group
Participation Form.” You should be considerate but honest in filling out this form since it
might affect the individual grade for the respective assignment of every member of your
group including yours. The individual grade can be higher or lower than the original one
given to the entire group. An equal effort by each group member to complete the assignment
should be sufficient to preclude any deviation of the individual grade from the group grade.