I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Missouri and then received both my Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Finance from Creighton University.
After graduation, I worked in the pension consulting industry. During my time, in pension consulting, I worked primarily with portfolio construction, asset allocation, and investment analysis. During this time I earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and the Financial Risk Manager (FRM) designation.
I was later offered a job in Chicago working for William Blair, an organization which is well known for their investment banking, investment management, and private wealth management. During my time at William Blair, as a performance analyst, I grew a greater understanding of attribution analysis, GIPS compliance, and benchmark decomposition. While at William Blair I earned the Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement (CIPM).
Currently, I work as a quantitative analyst in Austin, Texas at Texas Treasury Safekeeping Trust Company. In my current role, as a quantitative analyst, I spend the majority of my time building private, public, and hedge fund models for portfolio managers.
What Will You Bring Into the Classroom
One of the things I appreciated when I was in college was when professors would go out of their way to help students. For example, I had a professor at Creighton University who would put together practice problems and slides that I still utilize today.
I admire how much time he spent personalizing the finance course, which made it easier to learn the material and challenge students like me with more detailed information. My goal is to do the same thing for my students so they can reference what I’ve taught them in their future careers.
Finance Course
At Midland University, I teach the 632 finance course, which walks students through the investment environment, different asset classes, equity models, bond pricing, options market, and the term structure of interest rates, behavioral finance, and gives students a preview on futures markets.
The part of this course that I am most excited about is behavioral finance. I love Behavioral finance because it focuses on investors’ fears and how they can drive market irrationality. Every investor suffers from some form of psychological biases so it is interesting to study and start seeing where I have made similar cognitive errors.
In this class we will focus on learning, “how things change over time” and “how our current environment is changing?” The best way to gauge this type of change is by keeping up with the news, websites such as Market Watch and Bloomberg, and paying attention to new companies that are impacting the world.
What Are You Doing Differently This Term?
One of the things I am revamping for this course is a portfolio management project. I will be asking students to manage a simulated portfolio throughout the semester and write about what they’ve learned and how it can be applied to the marketplace. Then, to take it one step further, I’d like to have students actually create an investment policy statement for a variety of institutional investors such as an endowment, a defined benefit plan, or a defined contribution plan. Our portfolio management project will help students gain real-life experience and apply what they’ve learned to their portfolio throughout the semester.
Resources for Students
Whether a student has a question about their 401k plans or would like feedback on their personal portfolio, I hope that my students use me as a resource.
However, if students would like to learn more on their own, there is a free website called Seeking Alpha they can use. Seeking Alpha allows people around the world to share information on different stocks, different equities, and what’s going on in the marketplace. Students can look up any stock and see what other peoples’ opinions are like, for example why you’re wrong or why they’re right. Through this resource, students can come up with their own hypotheses and test their theories against the comments.
There’s also an institution called FundFire. Fundfire is a site that is dedicated to monitoring the asset management industry, particularly institutional fund flows and managers. FundFire is a great resource if you want to see what big institutional investors are doing, what they’re investing in, as well as who they’re using to invest in that process.
