There are plenty of other related fields to explore as well such as financial journalism, insurance, securities law, design of financial information systems and real estate. But in the end, most jobs revolve around the goal of helping people who would like to invest their money find people who have a good use for that money. This can involve something as simple as setting up a meeting between an investor and a someone starting a new business or as complicated as carrying a multi-country swap of debt payments between several corporations and governments. Some people think finance is all number crunching. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Finance is about ideas.
You'll know that you really understand finance when you can see straight through these disguises to the essence of issues. To help us get started on this now, let's look over a couple of the really big ideas that we will be focusing on in this class. Financial markets determine prices for everything from IBM stock to pork belly futures. These prices often fluctuate wildly in response to news about the economy and specific markets. Normally, these price fluctuations reflect changes in the underling value of assets.