From Class Rooms to Class Zooms: Teaching During COVID Times!

Structure: In keeping with the idea that there is no one best investment philosophy, the class will begin with the much maligned philosophy of technical analysis and charting, before moving on to value investing and growth investing in its different forms. We then look at trading strategies built around information and arbitrage-based strategy, before ending with a sobering assessment of how difficult it has proved for active investors to beat the market.

Sequencing and Overlap

If you an uninterested in any of these classes, there is clearly nothing more to say. If you are, I can offer my subjective road map through the classes.

The course to start with is the Foundations class, since it is only twelve sessions and covers the basics. Feel free to jump ahead if you find the material too basic or just do the sessions that you are interested in.
Of the remaining three classes, the one that I think has the widest reach is corporate finance, since understanding how to run a business is something that I believe everyone can benefit from. Put simply, whether you are corporate lawyer, a marketing executive, a consultant or a strategist, understanding corporate finance can make you better at your job. In terms of sequencing, it also lays the foundations for getting more out of the valuations class and should precede it.
Valuation builds on corporate finance, but is most useful to those in the business of valuing companies (appraisers, equity research analysts, M&A analysts), but understanding what drives value can also help entrepreneurs and private equity investors. I think that understanding value can be useful even if you consider yourself more of a trader, but that may be my biases speaking.
The investment philosophies class is aimed at people interested in investing, whether they be individual investors or professional money managers. Thus, if you have little interest in actually valuing companies from scratch, and more interest in getting a broad perspective on how to invest money, you can skip both corporate finance and valuation and just take this class.

Will there be some topics that get covered in more than one of these classes? Of course, but in my view (and remember again that I am biased), these are topics that are worth repeating and looking at through a different lens. Thus, I will cover the basics of estimating cost of capital in corporate finance, but with the perspective of estimating hurdle rates for companies that are evaluating projects, and again in valuation, but from the perspective of investors trying to value a company.

From Class Rooms to Class Zooms: Teaching During COVID Times!

Published on August 7, 2020 at 8:12 am by Aswath Damodaran in News, Stock Analysis, Tech

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