Dr. Diz is the Martin J. Whitman Professor of Finance and director of the Ballentine Investment Institute at Syracuse University. He also serves as managing director of the Orange Value Fund, LLC. Dr. Diz’s areas of research interest include value, control and distress investing and financial distress, as well as investment banking, credit analysis and hedge funds.
The purpose of the course is to provide the student with the needed tools to understand and learn the discipline of value investing. This is a course about business valuation, corporate finance and security analysis with an emphasis on analyzing public companies from the bottom up. This is in sharp contrast with traditional academic finance, which is heavily top down and assumes substantive consolidation between the company and its constituencies (managements, stockholders, bondholders, trade vendors, etc.). We examine the company as a stand-alone, separate and distinct from shareholders, managements, creditors, regulators, etc. We study the conflicts of interest and communities of interest among these constituencies and look at the markets where those different constituencies participate, i.e. public markets, private markets, markets for corporate control, markets for distressed credit instruments, etc. The course is focused on the valuation of businesses and how corporate values are reflected or are not reflected in public security prices and why. The student learns the important differences between investing and speculating, which will serve as the basis for understanding what value investing is all about. We make extensive use of corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), press releases, and media reporting to understand the issues that are important to real world investment issues. Since I am doing this in Bogota, I have also included examples of Colombian companies. We also touch on issues of corporate law, securities law, credit analysis, and financial accounting. Throughout the course we find it very useful to contrast the academic view against the value investor’s view. The course is not based on a textbook but on several books written by professional investors. During class we shall be contrasting both the academic and professional approaches so that you can reflect on the merits and limitations of both views. Prerequisite FIN 301 or equivalent.
You will learn to:
…and more