MFIN 8845
Global Financial Markets · 1 instructor on record · 4 sections
That is the class itself, averaged across everyone who taught it. Who taught it, and how each of them scored, is the board below — that is what a student picking a section is actually choosing between.
Boston College's own “intellectually challenging” question for this class only — students answer it positively about courses that stretched them, so it measures intellectual challenge and NOT grading, workload or quality. Almost every BC class scores high on it, which is why it is shown as a rank rather than a score.
Boston College reports workload for this class only as one of five bands, not as a number of hours, and it does not publish what the bands mean — so this site will not translate it into hours. Higher means more work, which is not the same as worse.
The focus of this course is on the fundamental drivers, functioning and inter-connectedness of global financial markets. Products covered will be interest rate markets (government bonds, money markets, swaps, interest rate derivatives, credit markets), equity indices, and foreign exchange markets.Tickers flash across TV screens detailing every move ininterest rates, currencies and equity markets. Why do some events move marketssometimes and not at other times? What just happened in UK markets? We willexplore the role of economic data, flow of funds analysis, central bank policy,and fiscal and other government policies from a macro perspective in assessingthese questions. We will learn from historical episodes that still shapemarket structures and behavior today.We will approach these topics from a practitioner's perspective and two or three active portfolio managers will be guest lecturers over the course of the semester. Learning will be via a combination of classroom, reading research papers, and observing markets in real time. There will be weekly homework assignments related to required reading that include current events. A team based project and a mid-term project will tie together subjects covered to that point in the course. Discussions of the current market environment will take place over the period of the course, with the final project requiring each student to formulate and present an investment outlook that ties together the various disciplines learned over the semester. A curious and open mind are helpful attributes for students wishing to take this course. Students can only receive credit for either MFIN8845 or MFIN8855 - not both.
| Instructor | Overall | Workload | Challenge | RMP overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Karim BastaFinance | 834 records | 78th | 55th | 863 ratings · all classes |
There is no ranking to read here: Karim Basta is the only instructor with evaluation records for MFIN 8845, so the number is a record, not a position. The RateMyProfessors figure is their overall score across everything they teach, not their score in this class.
Also taught by Karim Basta
1 other class| Class | Instructors | Course score |
|---|---|---|
| MFIN 2215Global Financial Markets | 13 records | 83 |
Other MFIN classes
All of themThe line
All 13 items · means across 4 recordsBar length is the rank against every comparable record we hold, not the raw score: BC's questions all have a median around 4.5, so a raw-scale bar would be nearly full on every row and would tell you nothing. Every bar is one ink colour — nothing here is graded green or red. The hatched bars are not ratings at all: a higher number on either describes a different course, not a better one.
Game log
4 sections · newest first| Instructor | Term | Sec | Instr | Course | Work |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Karim Basta | Fall 2025 | 01 | 90 | 90 | 60 |
| Karim Basta | Fall 2024 | 01 | 75 | 77 | 60 |
| Karim Basta | Fall 2023 | 01 | 88 | 85 | — |
| Karim Basta | Spring 2023 | 01 | 80 | 79 | 60 |
How to read this boardInstructors are ranked on their record in this class only, never on their average across everything they teach. Scores are out of 100 — Boston College's 1–5 agreement scale, ×20, the way these numbers were printed for years. Workload is BC's own five-band figure, not a number of hours, and is shown as a rank. A dash means the question was not reported, and is never a zero.