Question: Term Paper/Case Study: You have the option to write a term paper/case study during this semester on practically any finance topic that interests you. Yes, any finance topic that interests you:
- Feel that Amazon overpaid for Whole Foods or Facebook overpaid for Whatsapp? Write a case study on it!
- Are cryptocurrencies solid investments, or are they purely speculative and cryptocurrency markets are in a bubble? I don't know. Write a paper on it!
- Have you been trading stocks/cryptocurrencies and feel there are trading strategies that can yield risk-adjusted abnormal profits? Awesome! Write a paper on it (Share the wealth!)
- Own a business (or help run a family-owned business) and want to share a specific, finance-related aspect of your story - how you raised funding, or how did you decide on the capital structure, or how did you adjust the capital structure as business grew, or how did your financing needs change as the business grew, etc.? What a ride! Share your story, write a case on it!
This is primarily a self-paced exercise, i.e. I will not give you hard deadlines during the course of the semester - you will just need to submit your final paper/case study by Sunday, April 15 (11:59 P.M. MST)before semester-end. If you do decide to write a paper/case study, you will need to follow some steps:
1. Identify a research topic of interest (read, read, read!)
2. Discuss the topic with me so we can refine the idea and the research question/scope.
3. Write a well-researched paper/case study. You may need to consult multiple books, newspaper articles, finance data basis, do financial modeling and quantitative analysis, and may even need to conduct interviews to write a solid paper.
4. (Very important) Keep meeting with me regularly during the semester as you write the paper, so that I can give you feedback on how to improve your writing, quantitative analysis etc.
Your grade on the paper/case study will be primarily determined by how much time you spend on it, how frequently you see me during the semester to discuss your paper/case study/findings, and how well you incorporate my feedback into the paper/case study.
Towards the end of the semester, I will post a handful of these papers/case studies on Blackboard for all students to read. Depending on the quality of your work and effort, you may very well have something you can publish by the end of the semester (which can be quite beneficial for you, professionally).