Influencer Courses

There are a large number of financial influencers and their teaching ability does not necessarily correlate to the number of followers. To some extent if you have 500k followers in Twitter like Brian Feroldi, you must be doing something right, but while Feroldi certainly looks like he delivers a high quality training product, that isn’t true of all these practitioners. We cover here:

Nathan Dean

Brian Feroldi

Ryan Reeves

Thomas Chu

Graham Neary

Safal Niveshak

Andrew Stotz

Jasper Quast

Pieter Slegers

The Investors Podcast Academy

Value Investor Academy by Nathan

This appears to be produced by Nathan Dean, although he doesn’t explain his background. The Warren Buffett Investing Course is priced at $199 and discounted to $99 and is advertised as 2 hours of video, but the run time is just 1 hour and 11 minutes. The material is directed at the absolute beginner who doesn’t understand what a P/E is. 

Contents include Buffett's Beginnings, Finding Wonderful Companies, One That we Understand,  Favorable Long Term Prospects, Operated by Honest and Competent People and How to Value a Company and Buy at Very Attractive Prices.

Finding Wonderful Companies explains a really simple screen with stocks above $100m, a P/E of <15, and RoE of <10%, and debt to equity <100%. If you don’t understand how to do this, you probably need to learn. 

You could buy this or there is a lot of material on YouTube which is just as good as this or even better and it’s free. The problem with YouTube is it can be hard to distinguish what’s good and what’s less good. You might be better off spending the time on Lawrence Cunningham’s books on Buffett’s letters.

Brian Feroldi

Feroldi used to write for The Motley Fool, appears a sensible commentator and having watched one of his marketing webinars, the material is solid and well taught – if you want a basic course, this might be a good option. Financial Statements Explained Simply is a 6 lesson course over 2 weeks which cost $850 as we went to press. 

For sure it will be a good course but it’s a little pricey. It might be worth considering an alternative option – for example Behind the Balance Sheet offers a self-paced course, an introduction to reading the 10-K using Apple as an example which is priced at $299. 

The advantage of an instructor led course is that you can ask questions at the time. For other courses you are reliant on emailing the teacher. This choice between cohort based and self paced courses is really a question of money and personal preference. 

Ryan Reeves Investing City

We bought this course and weren’t impressed. There was an error in the definition of a critical investing metric. To be fair, after that, we didn’t finish it, so the rest could be better. The course is called How to Kick Butt at Financial Analysis and was priced at $199.

Zen Investing Academy

Thomas Chu and Max Koh in Singapore run this cohort based course which claims 200 students and offers an early bird discount of 25% off. This $500 course has the following modules:

Module 1 Analysing the P&L

Module 2 How companies make money

Module 3 Key ratios

Module 4 Valuation

Module 5 Valuing high growth loss-makers

Module 6 Risk management

We haven’t seen any of the content so cannot really comment other than we were dubious about the inclusion of Module 5. They have several testimonials which is a good sign and the syllabus otherwise seems quite sensible. Can you really learn to analyse and value companies in 6 sessions of 2 hours each? Unlikely, but it could certainly help. There is no community, however, which is a serious omission.

The Investor Institute

Graham Neary is a UK investor who has built a course, Balance Sheets Mastery. There is a free preview which gives a couple of very simple examples of the difference between profit and cash flow. The course has 36 lectures and under 2½  hours of video content. It appears pretty basic and aimed at beginners. It’s hard to assess the quality as there is only one preview video but it looks reasonable, given it appears to be aimed at beginners. 

Neary claims to have 15 years of investment and trading experience and to be a well-known financial commentator. He has a Substack, but it only has 2000 subscribers and is not in the top 50 on Substack finance.

Main issue with this course is the price – at £375, it’s only at a small discount to the equivalent Behind the Balance Sheet course which appears more comprehensive. There are not many courses like this for beginners so it may save you time relative to watching multiple free YouTube videos - as we have said elsewhere, it’s hard to identify the good ones. 

Safal Niveshak

Safal Niveshak “works with investors to help them become smart, independent, and successful in their stock market investing and personal finance decisions.” He has a large following and we have read his newsletter which is good. He also produces fantastic handwritten and hand-drawn visuals.

He offers two courses, one on financial statements and valuation, the other on value investing.  The financial statements course is a sub-$100 product and includes case studies of Indian companies. The value investing course appears to be a cohort based course and again includes case studies of Indian companies. 

The courses are priced in Rupees and the offering seems to be aimed at the Indian market. The only problem with this for a US student is that you are unlikely to be familiar with the names. That’s hardly an insurmountable problem, but it makes it more difficult to think of parallels and to apply the learnings to your own market. 

There are 9 testimonials for the cohort course, 5 from India, 3 from the US and 1 from Singapore but on closer inspection, one of the US summaries was repeated. The online course only had 4 testimonials, all apparently from Indian students. There is also an in person workshop in Chennai. As with some other Asian providers, the materials are probably of a good enough quality (we haven’t seen them) but we prefer to learn on US or European examples. 

Niveshak is probably a good option if you are on a tight budget.

Real Vision 

A spinoff from the financial streaming channel, they offer an educational solution which features content from the channel and access to “masterclass” videos including written summaries. Founder Raoul Pal is a former macro hedge fund manager, but the courses have been constructed by the Real Vision Team of journalists. The courses include summaries of wisdom from some of their fantastic interviewees, including Raoul, Lyn Alden and Dan McMurtrie.

The price as we went to press was $599 which includes access to the streaming channel and includes about 10 hours of video. If you want the streaming subscription anyway, this is probably an interesting offer.

A. Stotz Investment Research

Andrew Stotz is a former sell side analyst turned academic. We have classified him here as he wasn’t really an investment practitioner and he works for an academic institution but isn’t one – so we have included him as an influencer although he doesn’t have a massive footprint like, say, a Brian Feroldi (7k vs 507k followers when we wrote this)

His principal online offering is the Valuation Master Class, billed as a “practical” course, although the free sample extracts we have seen are pretty academic. He also runs courses in person, which might be a good option, although he is Bangkok based.

Given his background as a sell-side analyst and an academic, we would expect his offering to be pretty high quality and he seems like a nice guy - he lives with his elderly mother (she is in her 80s) who features in some of his videos!

The online course costs $397 or $997 with additional practical exercises. The testimonials are all from local Thai students. We would have felt more comfortable with a more global group.

Stotz’s main website offers an outsourced CFO service, and services to companies to increase profits and valuation – the courses may be a side hustle. The courses are probably fine, but they seem quite cheap for the promises and testimonials are a question. Stotz advertises that students have got jobs at multiple banks, mainly local ones. We would be interested to hear from any past students.

Jasper Quast

A German influencer, he runs the site https://zumfachwirt.de/. I am told he runs investing courses and he has a lot of subscribers to his YouTube channel but my German is pitiful and we really cannot comment or recommend but German readers may prefer to study in their own language.

Pieter Slegers

Founder of the Compounding Quality Substack, Pieter offers quite a lot of learnings resources with his €599 annual subscription. This is aimed more at people wanting stock recommendations but he throws in a lot of useful resources with the subscription. We have the free access not the paid, so we cannot comment in full, but we would imagine that like Real Vision, this would be attractive of you want the main stock tips product anyway.

The Investors Podcast Academy

This is a spinoff from the popular podcast and they offer a range of paid investing courses. These look like they are aimed at beginners. For example, they have the Intrinsic Value Course which is priced at a reasonable $297. 

This course has 18 video lessons but there is no indication of how long each is and the level of detail the course goes into – for example, it offers Valuation of a Growth Company, Tesla, and a stable company, Berkshire Hathaway. To value Berkshire alone would be an incredibly tricky and complex exercise. We therefore imagine that this is quite high level material and aimed at novices.