Tag: finance

At 7:30 am Thursday, August 27, a chartered bus with 17 Olin MSF Corporate Finance students departed Danforth Campus for the first MS Corporate Finance Road Show to Chicago.

Escorted by Richard Ryffel, Olin finance faculty member and Greg Hutchings, senior advisor Weston Career Center, the students had the opportunity to meet with representatives and alumni from Goldman Sachs, BMO Capital Markets, William Blair, Northern Trust and Belvedere Trading. In addition to the company visits, students participated in a lively industry panel discussion on Thursday evening with representatives from UBS Financial Services, Citadel LLC, Gurtin Fixed Income and Alyeska Investment Group.  The group returned to campus late Friday evening August 28 after a successful learning and career exploration experience.

Many of us at Olin, remember 3Lau when he was a student here majoring in finance. Back then, he was known as Justin Blau. He was headed to Wall Street for a summer internship when he realized with encouragement from Prof. Glenn MacDonald that music was his true passion.

Justin was a member of the BSBA class of 2013 for three years before he dropped out and started performing his EDM mixes at some of the biggest venues in the US.

Watch video and read article on Forbes.com

Today was quite a day. We received lectures from four different speakers along the famous Rothchild Boulevard, the heart of Tel Aviv’s financial district. First up today was Ron Gura, who currently works for Aleph VC. He described how he made the switch from being an entrepreneur to being at the on the other side of the negotiations in the role of a venture capitalist.

Guest Blogger: Zach is a sophomore WashU.

Then we heard from Ron Goldi who works for Ajillion which was bought by Crossrider. [Quick side-note: We talked to Goldi on the roof of the Crossrider building, which was simply gorgeous.] Goldi actually made the opposite switch from Gura: Goldi went from being a venture capitalist to an entrepreneur. Hearing from both of these businessmen back-to-back was interesting, as they each had their own reasons for switching jobs. They are perfectly content where they are now. But they both admitted that having been on the other side of the table really helps them now because they can think like the people they negotiate with. That is why it is beneficial to work both sides of the negotiation. What I took away was that this doesn’t just apply to the VC industry. To be successful in negotiations, you must know the perspective of each party involved. Once you have accomplished that, you will be able to achieve success.

After those two speakers, we met with Ran Achituv of Magma VC. Magma is a VC fund that focuses in on early stage tech companies, including Waze. In the funding spectrum, they are somewhere in between a micro-fund and a multi-stage generalist VC fund as they tend to spend between $100 million and $150 million for funding.

Afterwards, we were able to hear from the other side of the funding spectrum: a group of angels called Maverick Ventures. Maverick is basically the complete opposite of Magma. While Magma has probably invested in many startups, Maverick Ventures has only invested in six. They also aim to fund startups with somewhere between $1 million and $3 million, which is a huge difference from Magma, too. But the biggest difference I saw was the unique mindset Maverick had. They believed that while other VC’s may only find success in three out of ten startups, they wanted to be successful with all of their startups.

I have been hearing about different types of funders all throughout my time here, but now I finally was able to clearly differentiate them with these back-to-back presentations of competitors.

Now for our startup app we have been working on in class, we are able to clearly decide which type of funding we want to aim for.

Richard Ryffel, senior lecturer in finance at Olin and a former public-finance banker at Bank of America Corp. tells Bloomberg Business that many of the interest-rate swaps negotiated before the 2008 financial crisis were so complicated and speculative that there was no benefit. Bloomberg reports on three counties that have actually profited in a big way from the swaps.
Link to article, “How One Mississippi County Played Wall Street’s Fiddle” published
7/28/15.

The Financial Times reports there is a growing demand for jobs in financial regulation in response to industry scandals and calls for more oversight by investors and governments around the world. Greg Hutchings, director of specialized masters programs, tells the FT that there is also more focus on risk management jobs — a growing profession. In particular, the ability to identify, prevent and quantify risks for a company is in demand.
Link to article.

Meet Asaf Manela. He joined Olin Business School in 2011 as an assistant professor of finance. Professor Manela conducts theoretical and empirical research in finance. His current work focuses on asset pricing, financial intermediation, and information economics. He also spends a lot of time at the St. Louis Zoo…find out why when you watch the video above.

Manela received his PhD in Finance and MBA from the University of Chicago in June 2011. He holds a BA in Economics and Computer Science from Boston University.