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University of Pennsylvania: What is the best class for an engineer to learn basic investment strategies?

• I'm an engineer at Penn and I'd like to learn how to manage my money before I leave here and give up access to Wharton.  What's a good class to teach me the basics?  I'm talking about simple questions like how to pick funds, when to invest in bonds or real estate, how to choose a Roth IRA or regular IRA, etc? I don't have any classes that could act as prerequisites besides ECON 001/002, Math 240/241, and STAT 430.  I'm looking for something similar to FNCE 205.  Suggestions?

• Answer:

  I also attended Wharton and would strongly advise against using Wharton to actually teach you skills around making money.  My Wharton professors frequently complained about losing money in their stocks.  Wharton's finance course load mainly focuses on theoretical 'no arbitrage' scenarios i.e., using securities to replicate the performance of other securities, and if they don't replicate, it means you have an arbitrage opportunity.  Wharton's process of teaching 'valuation' assumes certainty of the future, and is about asking what is the best 'machine' we can use to process our information which we assume is true.  Traditional investing is about getting your inputs 100% right, and very crudely assigning a valuation based on prior experience.  What you are asking about appears to be neither of these -- you are asking normative investment questions that are never 'taught' because the true innovators in making these kind of macro investment decisions try to keep their data sets and ideas to themselves (i.e., Bridgewater Associates).  Think about it: if Wharton could teach you how to reliably make money one way through a systematic disconnect in the market place, then why wouldn't everyone simply pay up $60k a year tuition and all become bazillionaires? *All* obvious disconnects in value in the market place are traded away quickly. Other people that publish newsletters on the economy like Jim Grant, are primarily trying to monetize a high income base of customers, and could not actually invest themselves out of a wet paper bag.  Your basic premise though, of asking how to invest across asset classes and how to think about a turning point for valuation are what a lot of 'macro' hedge funds focus on.  No professor will be able to teach you this.  Start by reading some Bridgewater investor letters to get a sense of the scope and depth of your question. The best classes I took at Penn were actually in the OPIM department, where you were forced to think about how business models and practices impacted a company's ability to continue to generate returns.  Take those classes, esp. OPIM 210 if still available.