Revisión de los contenidos del Code of Ethics y los Standards of Professional Conduct que deben ser cumplidos por Candidates y CFA charterholders. Aplicación a casos concretos de conducta profesional indebida. Introducción al Global Investment Performance Standards.

• Herramientas estadísticas y matemáticas generalmente usadas en el mundo de las finanzas: time value of money, aplicaciones de discounted cash flows, statistical and probability concepts, probability distributions (binomial, normal), sampling and estimations, hypothesis testing, correlation and regression.

• Conceptos macro y microeconómicos que afectan el análisis financiero: economic fluctuations, unemployment and inflation. Fiscal policy, money and the banking system and moneraty policy. Supply, demand and the market process, consumer choice. Mercados de price-takers, price-searchers con altas y bajas barreras de entrada. International trade y foreign exchange parity relations.

• Measuring business income, financial reporting and analysis, short-term financial assets, inventories, long term assets & liabilities, contributed capital and statement of stockholders’ equity. The statements of cash flow. Analysis by financial ratios and common-size reporting, DuPont systems. Dillutive securities and EPS. Financial shenanigans. Analysis of inventories and long-lived assets: capitalizing vs expensing, depreciation and impairment. Analysis of income taxes, financing liabilities, leases and off-balance sheet debt.

• Overview del proceso de administración financiera: agency problems, the cost of capital, cash flow estimation and capital budgeting. Risk analysis and the optimal capital budget. Capital structure and leverage, dividend policy.

• Componentes de la tasa de retorno requerida por los inversores. Risk-free rate of return and risk premium. Securities market line y sus movimientos. Asset allocation decision: pasos en el proceso de portfolio management, necesidad de un investment policy statement. Teoría de portfolios de Markowitz, impacto de las covarianzas en la diversificación de riesgos. Introducción a los distintos asset pricing models, incluyendo CAPM.

• Seleccionando inversiones en un mercado global. Organización y funcionamiento de los securities markets, incluyendo sus principales características. Competitive bids, negotiated sales, private placements. Mercados primarios, secundarios, regionales y OTC. Formas de ponderación y construcción de index series. Hipótesis de los mercados eficientes: formas débil, semifuerte y fuerte, conclusiones.

• Proceso de valuación de securities: top-down approach, dividend discount model. Earnings multiplier model, ratios price-earnings (P/E) estimados. Cálculo de earnings per share (EPS). Clasificación de business cycle stages y análisis de industrias globales. Growth, defensive, cyclical and speculative stocks. Introducción a fundamental analysis y technical analysis. Price multiples: price to earnings (P/E), price to book value (P/BV), price to sales (P/S), price to cash flow (P/CF

Features of debt securities, Risks associated with investing in bonds: interest rate risk, call and prepayment risk, credit risk, liquidity and exchange rate risks, inflation and volatility risks, etc. Bond sectors and instruments: US Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, municipalities and collateralized debt obligations. Corporate bonds: secured and unsecured instruments. Credit enhancements, asset-backed securities. Yield curves and yield spreads, term structure of interest rates. Determinación de la tasas apropiadas para valuar los cash flows de un bono. Current yield, YTM, yield to put, yield to worst. Cómputo del valor de un bono usando forward rates. Duration (Macaulay and modified) and convexity. Interest rate risk para option-free bonds. Price volatility para putable bonds.

Instrumentos derivados y sus mercados: regulados vs OTC. Forward y futures, determinación de posiciones, FRAs y currency forwards. Constitución de márgenes, delivery options. Opciones: europeas y americanas. Determinación de su valor intrínseco y time value, cómo se determinan sus payoffs. Caps y floors. Put-call parity. Swap markets: currency and interest rate swaps. Estrategias con opciones.