Top 7 Free Investment Courses To Become Savvy In No Time

Move past the confusion and guess works, learn how to make your money work for you.

My foray into investing started with a rather funny prompt.

Once I reluctantly fired up Google’s Bard with the prompt: Explain financial index to me like I am a six-year old.

I used the same style of prompt to learn what index funds are, and how the two are related.

What I ended up getting were rich explanations of what financial indexes and index funds are, minus all the finance jargons. Those answers made me realize two things:

• Jargons can make simple things appear complex and discourage you from venturing in.
• Take away the jargons and the things that look complex will appear doable all of a sudden.

I went ahead to learn about other finance terms in the same way and, armed with this rich understanding of finance basics, would go ahead to scout the internet for courses on financial investment so I can learn more.

There are three things you must invest in to become wealthy, and a financial portfolio is one of them.

A portfolio is a collection of financial assets like mutual funds, bonds, stocks, real estate, and others. I don’t need to retell the important of these investments to your financial well being. But one thing will always hold true: you cannot build a portfolio if you don’t understand financial investment.

This is where learning comes in, and I have curated 7 free courses that can get you from beginner to ready-to-invest in no time:

Yale University’s Financial Markets

A course by Yale is a big deal, but it’s not just the name; this Financial Market course by Yale is a big deal because of the quality of content.

The instructor, Robert Shiller, is a professor of economics in the university. In the course he explains how finance is important to everyday life, and why students should contemplate the deeper significance of this truth.

The course takes approximately 33 hours to complete, and will teach you:

• The basics of financial markets
• Behavioral finance and forecasting
• How to explore recessions
• Bonds and stocks

Plus more.

This is a free course, but there’s a fee if you want a certificate. The course runs on Coursera; you can start anytime, and you can learn at your own pace.

Investments By MIT OpenCourseWare

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative aimed at making all MIT graduate and undergraduate-level courses available online, for free.

MIT is the best university in the world, but not everyone has the financial spine to afford a study in the university, or the intellectual depth and luck to qualify for it.

But with OpenCourseWare you get all the lessons from the world’s best university from anywhere, for free. And this is why this investing course by MIT is a big deal.

The course teaches financial theories and empirical evidence for better decision-making during investing.

The course also covers topics on:

• Equity and equity options markets
• Fixed-income and credit sensitive instruments
• Market efficiency and active investments
• Behavioral finance

Among others.

Since this is an online version of a live class in an MIT classroom, the course features downloadable formats of lesson notes and assignments for all the lectures.

This is a free course, and is very okay for beginners.

Investing101: Free Stock Market Course for Beginners

This course is made up of 10 lessons, with each covering about 10 topics on average. After you finish with each lessons there are additional resources to help you if you want to dive deeper into the topic.

In the course you will learn how the stock market works and why it moves; fundamental and technically analyses, and you will also get a virtual trading account funded with fake $100,000 so you can practice stock trading and investing in ETFs.

This additional perk of a dummy account is what I like most about this course. You don’t just learn, you also get the chance to practice, and that makes your leaning more effective.

I learned that the course originally cost $99 but was made 100% free following the COVID-19 pandemic. The course is beginner friendly, and takes approximately 10 hours to complete.

Buffet Book’s How To Invest In Stocks

Many people know Warren Buffet, but not many people know him enough to write a #1 selling book on Amazon about the legendary investor.

Preston Pysch, founder of Buffet Books, is a #1 selling Amazon author of two books on Warren Buffet. He teaches how to invest like Buffet in his investment course.

The lessons are spread across three courses:

• Basic: where you will learn about stocks, bonds, and market psychology
• Intermediate: where you will learn the intrinsic value of stocks, bonds, and preferred shares.
• Advanced: where you will learn discount cash flow, earning, and more.

There are more than 37 video in the entire course. Each lesson comes with a clear outline of objectives, new vocabularies, and the lesson summaries, making the course easy to grasp and ensuring no learner gets lost in the pool of jargons.

BUS-123: Introduction to Investments

This might have come first, but because the content of this list is not sorted in any particular order, it’s fine that this course comes in fifth.

Taught by the flamboyant Frank Paiano, professor emeritus at Southwestern Community Collage’s School of Business and Technology, the course comprises of 43 lectures, with some being as short as 13 minutes, and others as long as an hour.

It will likely take days or weeks to complete, but this is a holistic course, extremely rich in details and offers real world examples you can learn from.

The course will teach you about bonds, mutual funds, equities, short-term investments, hybrid securities, how to allocate your investment, and so much more.

You will find the course on Paiano’s website (kind of messy over there, but that adds no dent to the quality of the course).

How to Start Investing for Absolute Beginners on Udemy

Let’s face it, there are thousands of information on investing out there; they can be overwhelming as well as contradictory. They make it hard to actually take the step and start investing.

This course is for absolute beginners, and aims to help you wade through the noise and start investing. In the course you will:

• Understand why market crashes occur
• Learn to overcome your fear of investing
• Learn how to save enough money for investing every month
• Understand what investing is all about
• Understand how there are several ways to invest but why at the end of the day, we only need one
• Determine what investment style might suit you best.

You can complete this course in less than an hour, and while it’s not as holistic as the other courses, it provides a good-enough starting point to learn and start investing.

Investing Basics For Millennials

Despite the name, the course is also beneficial for all ages of learners. This course is aimed at young learners, to teach them about investment, what to invest in, and how to be confident doing it.

The course goes through:

• A review of the risk and reward ratio in investment
• Lesson on the power of compound interest
• Proper diversification
• Historical stock market returns
• And how to investment is critical for keeping up with inflation

Wrapping Up

Investing seems a big deal if you are just starting out, but these courses will help make things simpler so you can go from complete novice to ready-to invest in no time.

Disclaimer: This article is solely for informational purposes. It does not constitute financial, tax, or legal advice. Consult with a relevant professional before making any significant financial decisions.