Advise on asset portfolio strategies for individuals or companies

How should institutional investors invest their clients’ money? Should you hedge currency risk? What is the effect of high frequency trading on financial markets? Asset management (or investment management) studies portfolios of assets, typically including stocks, bonds and cash, for individuals or companies. 

You will learn more about:

• the market microstructure of financial markets and how it affects prices;
• theories underlying the pricing of securities and important investment-related questions;
• the pricing of derivative securities. 

This is your track if you are interested in pursuing a career in the asset management industry.

Why choose the Asset Management track?

1. Beside the 6 general courses of the MSc Finance in your curriculum, you will have 3 courses with focus on financial markets and asset management.
2. You will be lectured by professors and experts working in a wide range of financial organisations and fields. Therefore, you have access to up-to-date cases and learnings from the field of asset management.
3. After graduation, you have an excellent job prospect at e.g. (inter)national hedge funds or in private banking.

Track-specific courses

Apart from the 6 general courses of the full programme, you will follow 3 track-specific courses and electives.

Real-life case: Algemene Pensioen Groep (APG) Asset Management

Algemene Pensioen Groep (APG) Asset Management is the largest institutional investor in the Netherlands and has around €459 billion in pension assets under management. These assets belong to 8 pension funds and are owned by 4.6 million people in the Netherlands. Is APG a giant facing diseconomies of scale or still harvesting cost-efficiencies? ABP is the largest client of APG. What if the interests of ABP differ from the interests of other clients? Who should design the strategic asset allocation of APG? Should APG manage the assets in an active or passive way?

Contemporary issues

• Factor investing strategies like Smart Beta are increasingly popular among institutional investors. These funds select securities based on attributes like firm size and value that are statistically associated with higher returns. How can you implement factor investing? What are the most robust factors? What is the impact of factor investing on active asset management?
• Pension funds, insurance firms and sovereign wealth funds are becoming increasingly active in the provision of capital to alternative asset classes, such as private equity, venture capital, real estate and infrastructure. What are the risk-return characteristics of these alternative assets? What are their investment costs? How much should funds optimally allocate to alternative assets?

Career prospects

Graduates of the Master's in Finance/Asset Management track have excellent job prospects for positions as portfolio manager, investment manager, risk manager, options trader and asset manager with pensions funds, hedge funds, private banking, mutual funds and regulatory institutions. They work at Dutch and international companies, such as:

• APG
• Optiver
• Robeco
• ING