Overview
The recent turmoil in the worldwide economy has highlighted the central role played by financial instituions in everyday life. Rusden’s Introduction to Finance and Investing program has been developped to provide a comprehensive overview of the structure and workings of the global financial system and highligh key events of the past twenty years including the 80′s bond markets, the internet bubble and the more recent sub-prime crisis.
What you will learn
- The basics of financial measurement: reading income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and more
- The main events in the financial markets over the past twenty years
- How to plan for your financial future
Course material
Financial Intelligence – Karen Berman, Joe Knight with John Case
In Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman and Joe Knight present the essentials of finance, but with an extra dimension. Succinct, easy-to-read chapters teach the fundamentals in a way that everyone can understand and put to work right away. But the authors also take you behind the scenes, to show where the numbers come from. Since nobody can quantify everything, accountants and finance executives always rely on estimates, assumptions, and judgment calls, which can skew the numbers in one direction or another. This book helps you recognize and understand those biases, challenge or correct for them when necessary, and use this information to be a better manage
Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity – Michael Lewis
“Panic” covers four major episodes: the 1987 United States stock market crash, the 1997-98 emerging-market bust-ups (called “Foreigners Gone Wild”), the dot-com meltdown and the current housing/credit/stock market collapse. Each is a triptych — the first panel is a brief essay by Lewis, the second is filled with contemporaneous newspaper or magazine articles that set up the boom, and the third presents sober analysis of why it happened.
The Millionaire Next Door – Thomas J. Stanley
Focusing on those with a net worth of at least $1 million, Stanley reveals fundamental qualities of this group that are diametrically opposed to today’s earn-and-consume culture, including living below their means, allocating funds efficiently in ways that build wealth, ignoring conspicuous consumption, being proficient in targeting marketing opportunities, and choosing the “right” occupation. It’s evident that anyone can accumulate wealth, if they are disciplined enough, determined to persevere, and have the merest of luck.
The Undercover Economist – Tim Harford
this book applies basic economic theory to such modern phenomena as Starbucks’ pricing system and Microsoft’s stock values. While the concepts explored are those encountered in Microeconomics 101, Harford gracefully explains abstruse ideas like pricing along the demand curve and game theory using real world examples without relying on graphs or jargon. The book addresses free market economic theory, but Harford is not a complete apologist for capitalism; he shows how companies from Amazon.com to Whole Foods to Starbucks have gouged consumers through guerrilla pricing techniques and explains the high rents in London (it has more to do with agriculture than one might think).
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“This book is about luck perceived and disguised as nonluck (that is, skills), and randomness perceived and disguised as nonrandomness (that is, determinism). It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason.”
Fooled by randomness was initially written as short stories around series of fictional characters. An irreverent introspective rumination on the deformations caused by randomness through literature, markets, philosophy, science, and mathematics. It made many readers feel better about their comparative fate.
Liar’s Poker – Michael Lewis
Liar’s Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author’s experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that define Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. The book captures an important period in the history of Wall Street. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, head of mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and firm CEO John Gutfreund.
How it works
Rusdens is an online distance learning provider connecting like minded individuals to short course and executive education programs. By combining in-depth analysis from some of the worlds leading business comentators with the networking opportunities of online communities, we are able to offer high quality training and development at a significant cost advatage.
