Corporate Finance I
Measuring and Promoting Value Creation

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Below are the top discussions from Reddit that mention this online Coursera course from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Offered by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this course you will learn how to use key finance principles to understand and ... Enroll for free.

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Taught by
Heitor Almeida
Professor of Finance, Stanley C. and Joan J. Golder Chair in Corporate Finance
and 11 more instructors

Offered by
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Reddit Posts and Comments

0 posts • 1 mentions • top 1 shown below

r/MeetKevin • comment
1 points • MrW0rdsw0rth

I took the plunge and bought the stocks and psychology of money course. I was looking for something that would help me get my arms around valuing a stock and understanding a company's balance sheets to push me towards feeling confidence in financial analysis for my own stock picks.

I have mixed feelings on the course. I'm 70% of the way through. I think the first 25 or 30% was really good. Kevin essentially offers you new ways to think about money, investing, and risk. This section is very helpful. The next 25 to 30% though is kind of filler, very very basic stuff that he and lots of other YouTubers have covered ad nauseam (how to increase credit score, best credit cards, etc). It's probably good for someone that is struggling with low credit, but if you can afford the course... I don't all that info is out there for free.

That's sort of what the course is in a nutshell. All if it is out there for free and most of it Kevin has covered on his YouTube channel for free, but the course is just organized so you don't have to go hunting for it.

The section on I'm right now is the "advanced" section that digs into fundamental analysis of a stock. My issue with this section is that there's not really a bridge between the really basic stuff and the more advanced stuff. You jump from concepts like what a stock is and how to buy one to calculating stuff like Net Present Value without really explaining what Net Present Value is.

As someone who never took a course financial analysis or Excel, I basically had to pause the course for a couple hours to go read up what NPV was and how to calculate it because someone in the comments on the NPV video said Kevin's calculation was wrong. And it turns out he did make a mistake and his values were wrong. I confirmed this by figuring out how to calculate the NPV by hand after reading and watching other courses. That shook my faith in the rest of the course. How many other errors are their in the financial analysis section?

In my opinion there is not enough detail in the financial analysis section, probably because Kevin is not a financial analyst at heart. He operates like you understand what every line item in a company's financial statement means—WACC, COGS, OPEX—but only glosses over what each of these actually means and doesn't cover what specifically they are measuring and how they are related to one another.

I haven't used the discord access yet that notifies you of Kevin's buy and sell alerts or the live streams, but so far I feel like there's a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the course itself. As it is right now, I don't think it's worth the price I paid for it. It's at least twice as expensive as I think it's worth, maybe 3 times. I'm assuming his other courses are the same. But apparently the price will continue to increase over time. That course starts off strong, but the quality and detail goes down as it continues. It doesn't really know who its audience is. Is it the beginner who knows essentially nothing and needs to improve their credit score? Or is it someone who has taken a few business classes and knows the jargon and can already read most of the line items on a company's balance sheet?

If you thinking about it for the Discord and Live Streams, then great, it's probably for you.

If you are like me and want to get a better handle on Financial Analysis, I'd suggest a much cheaper course, Corporate Finance I: Measuring and Promoting Value Creation with Heitor Almeida on Coursera.

If you want new ways to think about money, Kevin, Graham, Andre Jihk all cover that stuff for free in entertaining ways, you just have to search for it. In my opinion, Minority Mindset is probably the best of the financial YouTubers because he's not just making videos stuffed full of memes or that have clickbait titles. He's actually going for quality and gives away quality content in long form for free that he could easily be charging for.