onlinE portalS
There are a wide selection of online portals, with everything from Udemy offering literally 1000s of finance courses to Coursera which is interesting as it offers an “all you can eat” programme and this covers more than just finance. We cover here:
Masterclass
Coursera
Udemy
Finance Unlocked
Masterclass
Masterclass comes out top on our analysis. A recent Zoom offer allowed us to extend your subscription for 12 months at a cost of £35! That’s a no-brainer! It’s normally £120 pa which is cheaper than Netflix and extremely good value.
It’s a product which is more useful for intermediate investors than beginners who need more direct help. For investors with some experience who want to up their game, this is an enjoyable and entertaining way to pick up tips from top experts.
And it can be helpful in doing research on a stock – we listened carefully to the Bob Iger interviews with that purpose. And they have recently released a series entitled Mastering the Markets with contributions from Joel Greenblatt and Seth Klarman which we can’t wait to watch. Ray Dalio and Meredith Whitney are two other famous names.
How much you retain or learn is an issue and we would recommend this as a supplement to one of the practitioner led courses.
Udemy
This portal is extremely comprehensive but like YouTube, it has a lot of lower quality content too. And the problem here is that you can spend too much time trying to work out which are the good providers and that’s time better spent learning. And experience suggests that just because a video has a lot of views or a course has a lot of downloads, it need not be high quality – its marketing might be better than its content. That’s the risk here.
Coursera
This portal has a comprehensive offering and importantly, only academic institutions can offer courses – that means you are unlikely to find content that is a waste of time. You can even do an MBA here. The listings are so comprehensive that it’s best just to go through and search for what you want. There is a significant amount of free content on the site which is a good reason to explore here – we signed up for a free 3 hour course taught by Robert Schiller.
Fingrad
This website has a wide range of courses and caters to an Indian audience. We do not have any experience of the content but would not let that out you off, especially if your budget is constrained. There are various all you can eat subscription plans and a certain amount of content is available free. We shall enrol and report back once we have time.
Finance Unlocked
This is a new UK portal targeting corporate training. There is less here on investing but they offer an all you can eat type subscription plan.
Just £33/mth seems a reasonable deal for a vast range of video content. Only snag is their equities component is pretty limited. They only had 8 videos at the time of writing, mainly on equity options strategies although this could change. There is a wide range of courses covering banking, compliance, macroeconomics and much more.
You would really need to do a detailed review of the offer as it’s not targeted at enthusiastic equity investors so much of the content may not be relevant but the videos look good quality, professionally filmed and presented and we imagine the content will be high quality too.