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5 Popular Foundational Finance Courses On Udemy That Will Give You An Unfair Advantage In Investing Or Your Workplace

Learn how the pros manage money for themselves or for others


Since the start of the pandemic last year, more people have started trading online than previous years combined, led by American retail investors, many of whom have taken their stimulus checks and simply invested the bulk of them into the stock market, hoping for higher returns.

Seemingly overnight, everyone’s a “day trader”, but there can only be some who become winners. If you are looking for an opportunity to develop your edge in the financial markets, or even in the workplace, Udemy can help you sharpen your finance knowledge, even if you do not have any prior experience.

Here are the top 5 most popular foundational finance courses on Udemy that will boost your knowledge and take you to the next level, whether it is investing in the markets or gunning for that big promotion.

#1 Introduction To Finance, Accounting, Modelling And Valuation

Why this course:

Learn basic finance and accounting from scratch by an award-winning MBA professor, Ivy League Graduate and ex-Goldman venture capitalist. In this course, you will learn how to analyse and understand important financial statements like cashflow statement, balance sheets and profit-loss statements, which will be important in figuring out whether a company is financially healthy. You will also learn how to do financial projections to estimate a company’s future earnings. On top of that, you will learn important financial ratios like gross margin, operating margin in order to understand a company’s debt or profitability.

Who this course is for:

  • Aspiring accountants or analysts
  • People interested in finance and investments
  • Corporate finance staff (financial controller)

Course content:

  • Accounting
  • Finance
  • Modelling
  • Valuation
  • Financial ratios

Price: $29.98 (Original price: $218.98)

#2 Python For Finance: Investment Fundamentals & Data Analytics

Why this course:

The world of finance has become intertwined with technology, and at the forefront of this revolution is data science. Taking the emotions out of trading (which can be a highly emotional affair for most people), Python as a programming language can help you collect data and act upon inputs given by you to enter and exit positions. Learning how to understand data can be a very useful skill especially in finance today.

Who this course is for:

  • Aspiring data scientists
  • Programming beginners
  • People interested in finance and investments
  • Finance graduates and professionals who need to better apply their knowledge in Python

Course content:

  • Data analytics
  • Regression analysis
  • Capital asset pricing model (CAPM)
  • Monte Carlo simulations

Price: $22.98 (Original price: $198.98)

#3 Financial Derivatives: A Quantitative Finance View

Why this course:

If you are following #wallstreetbets and the Gamestop / AMC bonanza, you would have likely seen the term options thrown around. Options are part of the family of derivatives; financial instruments that can be used to hedge your portfolio, amplify your gains (and losses) and access otherwise illiquid asset classes. Understanding futures, forward contracts, swaps and options can be a useful tool for you as an investor. You can lock in prices, hedge against unfavourable movements in rates and mitigate risks for a limited cost. You will also learn how to use Python for fixed income and options.

Who this course is for:

  • Technical professionals who want to learn about quantitative finance
  • Finance professionals who want to improve their quantitative skills and learn how to analyse derivative products

Course content:

  • Interest rate fundamentals
  • Discounted cash flow analysis
  • Portfolio modelling
  • Long and short positions
  • The principle of arbitrage
  • Risk management principles
  • Dynamic hedging
  • Volatility trading

Price: $17.98 (Original price: $198.98)

#4 The Complete Finance Manager Course

Why this course: Want to get a job or promotion as a finance manager? This course will help you figure out how companies measure financial performance, implement an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system and forecast future cashflows. Other than those interested in finance-related jobs, this course is also useful for entrepreneurs and business owners who want to expand their knowledge on the corporate finance side of things.

Who this course is for:

  • Financial analysts
  • Accountants
  • Controllers
  • Commercial finance analysts
  • Business analysts
  • Assistant managers
  • Aspiring finance managers

Course content:

  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
  • Accounting basics
  • Advanced accounting
  • Working capital optimisation
  • Capital budgeting
  • Company valuation

Price: $17.98 (Original price: $198.98)

#5 Investment Analysis And Portfolio Management – Core Finance

If you are thinking of growing your investment portfolio or aspiring to become a fund manager, this course will help you analyse investments and manage portfolios better by understanding investment security relationships and estimating returns, measuring risk and return, and exploring diversification and optimisation, all of which are important to creating a well-rounded portfolio for yourself and others. This course may be a bit technical, so it may be good if you have some prior knowledge in finance.

Who this course is for:

  • ACA, ACCA, CFA®, other Professional students
  • Finance Managers seeking to understand conceptual techniques like portfolio design
  • Investors wanting to work with techniques that are rigorously grounded in academic and practitioner literature
  • Analysts, and aspiring investment bankers wanting to gain a solid foundation in investment analysis

Course content:

  • Understanding powerful relationships between risk, return, and price
  • Intuitively explore the baseline fundamental law of Financial Analysis – The Law of One Price
  • Calculating stock returns for dividend and non-dividend paying stocks, manually
  • Downloading and working with real world data, and estimating stock returns on Excel® / Google Sheets
  • Estimating the total risk of a stock
  • Estimating the market risk of a stock
  • As a by-product of learning to measure the market risk, you’ll also learn how to quantity the relationships between securities – something that will be a focal theme of portfolio management and investment / financial analysis

Price: $17.98 (Original price: $188.98)

Understanding basic finance is important especially if you do not have a finance background and you want to grow your investments or you want to break into the world of finance. Turn your knowledge into money as you use Udemy courses to upgrade your financial prowess.

Read Also: 10 Courses You Can Use Your SkillsFuture Credits To Kickstart Your Entrepreneurial Journey

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