Free online courseFinance course

Course Description

Build a solid foundation in corporate finance and learn how financial professionals evaluate decisions under uncertainty. This free online course connects the logic of valuation with real market instruments, helping you move from intuition to clear, defensible analysis. Whether you want to advance in Business and Marketing, prepare for a corporate role, or simply understand how capital is priced, you will practice the frameworks used to judge investments, compare alternatives, and explain results in a way that stakeholders trust.

You will start with the core problem behind most financial choices: money has a time dimension. By working with present value relations, you learn how discounting links today and the future, why the same cash flow can have different values depending on timing and risk, and how net present value becomes a decision rule for accepting or rejecting projects. These ideas are not just academic; they form the backbone of capital budgeting and everyday corporate trade-offs.

From there, the course broadens into fixed-income securities, where you’ll see how bonds are priced and why measures such as duration matter when rates move. You’ll also explore how markets repackage cash flows through securitization, clarifying its purpose and the incentives it creates. Along the way, you’ll develop an instinct for what leverage changes in an investment: the balance between potential gains and the increased exposure to loss when conditions turn.

You will also gain practical insight into derivatives, including forwards, futures, and options. The course emphasizes how these contracts are priced, what drives their value, and why certain features of exchange-traded futures can be attractive in active markets. Options are approached through payoff intuition and models such as the binomial framework, giving you a structured way to reason about uncertainty rather than guessing at outcomes.

Finally, you’ll tie everything together with risk and return, portfolio theory, and the major asset pricing ideas used in modern finance. You’ll examine what market efficiency means in practice, how diversification reshapes risk, and how models like CAPM and APT help explain expected returns. You’ll also encounter adaptive views of markets that challenge simplistic assumptions and encourage more realistic thinking. By the end, you’ll be better equipped to read financial news critically, evaluate opportunities with discipline, and communicate financial reasoning with confidence.