Bachelor of Science (BSc)

BSc Management

  • Duration: 3 years
  • Year of entry: 2025
  • UCAS course code: N201 / Institution code: M20
  • Key features:
  • Study with a language
  • Scholarships available

Full entry requirementsHow to apply

Fees and funding

Fees

Tuition fees for home students commencing their studies in September 2025 will be £9,535 per annum (subject to Parliamentary approval). Tuition fees for international students will be £31,500 per annum. For general information please see the undergraduate finance pages.

Additional expenses

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme.

Policy on additional costs

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

Scholarships/sponsorships

The Manchester Bursary is available to UK students registered on an undergraduate degree course at Alliance MBS who have had a full financial assessment carried out by Student Finance England. 

In addition, Alliance MBS will award a range of Social Responsibility Scholarships to UK and international/EU students.

These awards are worth £2,000 per year across three years of study. You must achieve AAA at A-level (or equivalent qualification) and be able to demonstrate a significant contribution and commitment to social responsibility.

The School will also award a number of International Stellar Scholarships to international students achieving AAA at A-level (or equivalent qualification). Applicants who exceed AAA and/or have supplementary qualifications (such as EPQ) will receive additional consideration.

Additional eligibility criteria apply - please see our scholarship pages for full details.

Course unit details:
Financial Derivatives

Course unit fact file
Unit code BMAN30091
Credit rating 10
Unit level Level 3
Teaching period(s) Semester 1
Available as a free choice unit? No

Overview

Successful completion of this course and BMAN 30242 provides the basic analytical foundations for students wishing to pursue a career in financial markets and investment banking that require knowledge of currency, equity and interest rate risk management, corporate treasury management and derivatives trading. The companion course to this one, BMAN 30242 has as its major focus interest rate derivative instruments, including forward rate arrangements (FRAs) and interest rate swaps. 

Pre/co-requisites

Unit title Unit code Requirement type Description
Foundations of Finance A BMAN23000 Pre-Requisite Compulsory
Foundations of Finance B BMAN23000B Pre-Requisite Compulsory
Introduction to Corporate Finance and Financial Instruments BMAN20242 Pre-Requisite Compulsory
Foundations of Finance C BMAN23000C Pre-Requisite Compulsory
BMAN23000 (A), (B) or (C) or BMAN20242 is a Pre-Requisite of BMAN 30091.

Core/Compulsory/Optional/ Free Choice: Option

Pre-requisite units: A 40% pass mark for BMAN23000 or BMAN20242 (although a pass mark of 50% or higher is preferable). STUDENTS INTERESTED IN ENROLLING IN BMAN 30091 SHOULD HAVE STRONG QUANTITATIVE SKILLS AND SHOULD NOT BE INTIMIDATED BY COMPLICATED EQUATIONS.  

Programmes to which this course unit contributes (including cross faculty/school): Open to all programmes provided pre-reqs are met including IPO and exchange. Option:  Accounting, Mgt, IM, IBFE, Act Sci & Maths, BA Econ.

Aims

The course aims to describe, analyse, and evaluate the characteristics of some of the most important financial derivative instruments, namely forwards, futures, and options. The fourth building block of modern financial engineering, financial swaps are covered extensively in BMAN 30242 in the second semester. This course equips students with some essential techniques to be applied when valuing these financial derivatives and hedging the associated financial market risk exposures. In particular, it emphasizes the general principles central to derivatives valuation including no-arbitrage arguments and risk-neutral valuation methods, together with their implications for the pricing of the selected classes of financial derivatives.  The course also analyses the asset price dynamics that are important in deriving both the binomial and Black-Scholes option pricing models and pricing other more complex derivative instruments. 

Teaching and learning methods

Overall there will be 20 hours (10x2) of formal lectures + 6 hours (6x1) of workshop style tutorials.

• Lectures: 2 hours per week over 10 weeks  

The lectures will be on campus and a podcast of the lecture will be made available on Blackboard.  

• Tutorials/Workshops: 1 hours per week over 6 weeks  

The workshops run in weeks 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10. At the end of each workshop week the solutions to the relevant exercise pack will be made available via Blackboard.

Practice tests will also be made available on Canvas on a regular basis (via Mobius)  

Knowledge and understanding

  • be familiar with the characteristics of the relevant financial derivative instruments and factors affecting their prices
  • understand how financial derivatives are valued based on no-arbitrage pricing arguments and risk-neutral valuation methods
  • understand how the instruments covered can be used to implement basic market risk management strategies, appropriate for corporate applications
  • be able to solve basic problems requiring the ability to price derivative instruments and hedge market risk based on numerical data and current market conventions
  • have acquired the basic skills required for pricing financial derivatives, including familiarity with some central techniques, namely risk-neutral valuation, no-arbitrage pricing, the binomial model, and the Black-Scholes model.
  • be able to exercise quantitative and numerical skills in pricing derivative instruments.  
  • understand the Greeks and use these for hedging purposes
  • discuss and calculate implied volatility
  • be familiar with the volatility smile/term structure/surface and implied distributions and explain why these are observed in practice 
     

Intellectual skills

  • be able to exercise a capacity for independent and self-managed learning 

Practical skills

  • be able to exercise a capacity for independent and self-managed learning  

Transferable skills and personal qualities

  • be able to exercise a capacity for independent and self-managed learning 

Assessment methods

Formative Assessment: Weekly practice tests (Mobius)

Summative Assessment: Exam (100%)

Feedback methods

  • Feedback on formative assessment: Immediately via Mobius 
  • Feedback on summative assessment: Generic feedback released on Canvas after marks are announced  
     

Recommended reading

The recommended text for the course is Hull J.C. (2018), Options, Futures and Other Derivatives: Global edition, 11/E, ISBN-10: 1292410655, ISBN-13: 978-1292410654, Pearson Higher Education.

You must make sure you have access to a copy of the core text.  It is a very useful text for students intending to take BMAN 30242 in the second semester.  The website linked to the Hull text is: http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca /~hull/. An online version is available at https://read.kortext.com/reader/pdf/953506/ where you can access using your university email address, and login via institutional account. 

Study hours

Scheduled activity hours
Assessment written exam 2
eAssessment 1
Lectures 20
Practical classes & workshops 6
Independent study hours
Independent study 71

Teaching staff

Staff member Role
Ser-Huang Poon Unit coordinator
Eirini Konstantinidi Unit coordinator

Additional notes

Co-requisites: None
Dependent course units: None
Programme Restrictions: There are no programme restrictions for this course providing the pre-requisites listed above are met.

For Academic Year: 20245/26

Updated: March 2025

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