Financial Products: Personal and Regulatory Strategies

• Semester: Spring 2026
• Course ID: 296W
• Credit Hours: 2
• Unique: 29890

Description

This new 2-unit course is designed to introduce students to a variety of financial products and related personal and regulatory strategies. It is suitable for both students with no prior background in financial and related legal matters and students who have had pertinent academic or work exposure. From a personal standpoint, some basic knowledge of investment choices offered in our future employer’s retirement plan or available through our broker can help make our lives more secure—e.g., stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), gold, and bitcoins. As an example, the “ETF” is a 11-trillion dollar product that offers a variety of portals to seemingly endless combinations of asset classes, investment approaches, and long, short, inverse exposures—but, importantly, also has limitations. From a regulator’s standpoint, strategies need to respond to challenges from, for example, manias and crashes, investor financial illiteracy and cognitive biases, certain specialized debt products, and state pension fund underfunding. Various innovations (including certain index products and derivatives-based techniques) may undermine corporate governance and world financial stability. This course can deal only with a very limited number of such matters. The course does not offer any get-rich schemes or investment advice, nor does it offer easy nostrums for regulatory challenges. The only prerequisite is having completed either “Business Associations” or “Business Associations (Enriched).”