A lot of people come to trading or investing from different backgrounds and have not formally studied Economics or the securities markets. If you fit into this group fear not as most colleges now provide course and lecture notes free online so you can study the fundamentals to your hearts content. Many of the top university offer a selection of the course materiel in the form of video lectures, audio lectures and printed lecture notes. These courses are excellent for developing a wider body of knowledge without incurring large tuition costs.
I have categorised the courses into three levels foundation, intermediate and advanced. Foundation courses are pitched at a high school graduate level and if you have done no college start here. The intermediate level is recommended for people who know and understand all the concepts at the foundation level. The advanced level courses are pitched at the graduate level and assume a fairly high level of mathematical understanding.
Foundation
This course is offered by Berkeley and is offered in Webcast or audio format. Topics include all the basic microeconomic principles.
This course is offered by Berkeley and is offered in Webcast or audio format. Topics include: “national income, employment, and price levels, with attention to the effects of monetary and fiscal policy”.
This course is offered by the university of California and topics covered include:”financial intermediaries, domestic and global security markets, organized exchanges for stock and bond securities trading, and capitalization structure. Mechanics of the buy-side/sell-side, the role of investment bankers and brokers, the underwriting process, various types of financial securities and derivatives, and other topics that are timely to today’s global markets.”.
This course is offered by the Open University it is labelled as Masters level yet it contains little rigour and is very accessible to any level. The topics include:”the market context, perfect and efficient markets and the efficient markets hypothesis”.
This course is offered by MIT however it is unique as it is completely self contained with an online interactive text book, it is possible to study this course without a background in Calculus.
This course is offered by the Open University it is labelled as Masters level yet it contains little rigour and is very accessible to any level. The topics include: “risk aversion, quantifying risk, risk factors, discounted cash flows and the net present value rule”.
Introduction to statistical methods in finance
This course is offered by MIT topics covered include: ” probability theory, sampling theory, statistical estimation, regression analysis and hypothesis testing”.
Intermediate
This course is provided by MIT and topics include: “economic growth and long-run economic development, brief overview of optimal control theory and dynamic programming, basic neoclassical growth model under a variety of market structures, human capital and economic growth, endogenous growth models, models with endogenous technology, models of directed technical change, competition, market structure and growth, financial and economic development, international trade and economic growth, institutions and economic development”.
Introduction to Mathematical Probability and statistics
This course is offered by MIT, this is similar to the foundation statistics course however the course provides more rigour. Topics include: “basic probability models, combinatorics; random variables, discrete and continuous probability distributions, statistical estimation and testing, confidence intervals and an introduction to linear regression. “.
This course is offered by the Sloan School of Management topics covered include: ” portfolio theory, equilibrium models of security prices (including the capital asset pricing model and the arbitrage pricing theory), the empirical behaviour of security prices, market efficiency, performance evaluation and behavioural finance.”
This course is offered by the Utah State university and topics covered include: “international trade theory, policy and international finance”.
Behavioural Economics and Finance
This course is offered by MIT topics covered include: “prospect theory, biases in probabilistic judgment, self-control and mental accounting with implications for consumption and savings, fairness, altruism, and public goods contributions, financial market anomalies and theories, impact of markets, learning, and incentives, and memory, attention, categorization and the thinking process.”
Advanced
This course is offered by MIT and topics include:”shocks, labor markets and unemployment, and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE models)”.
This is an advanced course offered by MIT, if you have a fair math background you shouldn’t have to many problems with it. Topics covered include: “advanced models of moral hazard, adverse selection, mechanism design and incomplete contracts with applications to theory of the firm, organizational design, and financial structure.”
This is a course offered by MIT and topics include:” laws of large numbers and central limit theorems for sums of independent random variables. It also analyzes topics such as the conditioning and martingales, the Brownian motion and the elements of diffusion theory”.
This course is offered by MIT and is an advanced course if you don’t have a math background this course is not for you. Topics include: “Stationarity, Trends, ARMA Models, Projections, Partial Autocorrelations, Spectral Representations, Prediction and Wold Decomposition, Estimation and Specification Testing, VAR’s, Cointegration and GMM Estimation”.
This course is offered by MIT and is an advanced course if you don’t have a math background this course is not for you. Topics include:”(discrete) random walks and (continuum) diffusion. Applications include polymers, disordered media, turbulence, diffusion-limited aggregation, granular flow, and derivative securities.”
Object Orientated programming in C++
This course is offered by the university of Queensland it is offered in a very interactive form. The topics include:”abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism, in the context of the C++ language and key software engineering principles”.
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Wow, huge resource! Thanks a ton for the links.