Finance down.

It felt like I was writing a dissertation rather than pumping up numbers through my calculators. I could do the maths and I am supposed to be good at blah blahbing but I am not sure that I can tell which way share prices are supposed to go if you mess up with some arbitrary data. This exams was a lot about intuition. If you lack intuition, you had better be a good politician.

Finance exam was OB Re-loaded:
Structural Lens: please price this two-year European Call Option using some blah blah nuymbers, and tell me whether you can fight back OPEC using forward contracts to hedge against oil price variations
Cultural Lens: if you were an investment banker, how would you value this? What would you suggest in terms of capital structure? If you were an investor, by how much do you think you would be exploited if the firm raises equity for this new investment? If they go for a debt more senior to the one that you are currently holding? When should you start jumping out of the boat and run for your life?
Political Lens: how many words can you use to talk your way through a subject you have no clue about while managing to sound interesting, concise and clear - and oh so intelligent that even your expert audience cannot get to your point.

Apart from that, I vote it the most creative exam of this series in terms of name invention: Mr Entrylevel does not qualify for Executive Stock Options (poor guy, he has to go through the trouble of calculating the replicating portfolio using company stock and riskfree borrowing), the company Vidivendi (in a lot of trouble right now) was in desperate need of your help as it tried to alter its payout policy and introduce some dividend payments, before the CEO heads off to jail, you need a statistics tutor to deal with the up and down factors of call options on the shares of Heteroskedasticity Inc and Nofrills airlines was facing tough competition from Fixedwing.
The most unimaginative name was Start Up Inc, an "entrepreneurial company" contemplating the most common problems to all startups: raising funds. How about "launch pad", "Fresh Start", "Naive Illusion", "Short Lived Hope", "Apply for an MBA"...ok. Maybe not.

So, keeping all options open, if the cum-dividend price of the share of you debt remains at $43,000 / 5 periods, how many drinks can you buy at the local bar to drown your disappointment at receiving an INSEAD warrant calling you again, in the futures, to buyback your pride and put up a fight against equity again. Alternatively, you are proposed to issue a tender cash offer to smooth the edges and hedge your bet.

This cash offer will be fairly priced as a forward contract with a finance professor to agree on a strike mark beforehand, at the beginning of the period. Or used to buy a call option on grades and exercise it only if it falls above 2.5. After all, the assumptions for BlackScholes states that the expected returns of stocks are normally distributed, our z-curve will nicely do the job.

Maybe I just straddled, making grand plans about being a finance wizard and not doing enough about it...