Back from the Holiday

Well after a well deserved break, all the students are back.

First years are in their Negotiations class which odd for me as I didn’t do this last year due to the Middle East study tour, but now I see what it was like with the Atrium constantly being flooded by ambitious MBA students trying to get better deals in their exercises. There have also been requests for help with preparing for recruitment week which is coming up next week and some postings already up.

Even second years are at school, many having the clever idea of taking an intensive or two to lighten their final term course load.

Yesterday, we did a presentation for our ICP in Islamic Finance. Arash and I did a presentation on two comparable securities, one conventional and one Islamic and we showed they were strategically and operationally comparable (same industry, business model, enterprise value, capital structure, debt ladder, similar maturity, seniority and economic conditions, but different country and terms) and we analyzed the yield, adjusting for country risk and broke down the spread accounting for liquidity risk, minor maturity differences and increased cost of capital related to Sharia compliant terms.

This material will be used as part of Rotman’s new Executive MBA program class on Islamic Finance. While we aren’t quite finished with our work, the next step being to propose a term sheet for what the conventional financing would look like if it were Sharia compliant, I’m very happy with our progress and the insight we were able to bring into this new product class.