Online education seems to be a rapidly growing movement. Indeed, massive open online courses (or MOOCs) are a brilliant thing as they allow people from all over the world access to high quality education for little or no cost. Here are six free stock market courses for beginners that you can find online:
Free stock market courses for beginners
Financial Markets with Robert Shiller (YALE)
Robert Shiller is well known in finance and is the Professor of Economics at Yale University. He’s also penned a number of interesting books such as Irrational Exuberance and Macro Markets.
This course gives an overview of how society manages risk and fosters enterprise. Amongst other things it looks at efficient markets, real estate, options and investment banks. You can also watch it on YouTube.
Stocks and Bonds, Khan Academy
The Khan Academy has lots of free courses including this one on Stocks and Bonds. The way it’s laid out is really nice and everything flows together well. You can learn how to short a stock, how to understand company statements and get a primer on corporate valuation.
Investment Philosophies by Aswath Damodaran (NYU)
This one by Aswath Damodaran is available from the iTunes store and contains 39 webcasts. Aswath teaches corporate finance and valuation at the Stern School of Business at New York University and this course attempts to analyse a number of different investment approaches. You can also see this one on YouTube.
Not all the free courses on Udemy are much good, but this one has over 40,000 students. It’s a nice introduction to investing the Warren Buffett way and contains three hours of content.
Morningstar Investing Classroom
Quite a nice one for beginners, the Investing Classroom from Morningstar contains 172 individual courses on stocks, bonds, funds and constructing a portfolio. By completing the course and taking the quizzes you can even earn points towards a premium subscription.
Getting Started in the Stock Market, Wall Street Survivor
Wall Street Survivor also has a number of stock market courses but again, most of them are paid. This is a free one that talks about the stock market basics. There’s also one called Using Online Resources which is interesting. It talks about how to research stocks with Seeking Alpha and how to follow company news with Benzinga, though to be fair it’s also a bit of a plug for both those companies.
Round-up
So these are the best free stock market courses for beginners that I’ve found online. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of trading courses around as most of the free ones are tuned to investing.
Discount coupons
One thing to remember is that it’s always worth taking a look on the Udemy site, as new courses are added all the time and they often start out free for a period.
As well, Udemy instructors are always offering discount coupons too, like this one which gives you money off my course.
What about you?
Have you taken any of these free courses and found them useful? Have you come across any others? Leave your comments below, it would be good to hear from you.
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