THE HANDS-ON LEARNING OF APPLIED PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENTKent McCarthy

Introduction Kent McCarthy is the president and CIO of his company

Jayhawk Capital Management, an alternative investment firm with a focus on Chinese companies. Throughout his career, Kent McCarthy has contributed substantial support to his alma mater, the University of Kansas, and also co-wrote a book based on a course he created there called Applied Portfolio Management: How University of Kansas Students Generate Alpha to Beat the Street. For his work with the course, he won the prestigious Henry A. Bubb Teaching Award for business school professors. 

The Applied Portfolio Management (APM) course was created to help students learn to work with a real portfolio, come to understand how the stock market functions, and work with their investments intelligently and successfully. 

Applied Portfolio Management The class involves discussion, question-and-answer periods,

and lectures from professionals all over the world. Past lecturers have included former CNET Network's CFO Doug Woodrum and philanthropist and business executive Penny Pritzker. 

The APM class is focused on combining financial theory with practice and introducing students to real-time changes in the markets. For this reason, the schedule of lecturers is constantly changing depending on what’s happening in the market at the moment. Students are required to keep up their research on current markets by reading business news sources such as The Wall Street Journal and the Economist in addition to staying abreast of the constantly updated market data and analytics.