#BU-04-33 Finance Fundamentals: Investment Theory and Practice
About Course
The Open UniversityDescription
Ensure your investments are effective and match your risk-return appetite
Research shows that UK households are poor at investment management, with a limited understanding of choices, risks and returns. This could mean that many people cannot afford to retire in future.
This online course will give you the tools to avoid this nightmare. You will study investment choices, and the risks and returns of each; investment strategies and your risk-return appetite; and behaviours that can impair effective investment decisions.
The Open University’s Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance created this course, with the generous support of True Potential LLP.
What topics will you cover?
- Investment planning and decision-making
- Savings and investment products
- Investment risks
- Investment theories – diversification, portfolio theory, capital-asset pricing model
- Investment theories – efficient market hypothesis, random walk theory, chartism
- Investment in practice – methods employed by fund managers
- Historical analysis of investment returns
- Historical investment episodes and what we learn from them
- Individual human behavioural biases and investment decision-making
- Group human behavioural biases and investment decision-making
Who will you learn with?
I am Director of the True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance (PUFin) at the OU Business School. Previously I was Treasurer of Nationwide Building Society.
Who developed the course?
The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution in the UK and a world leader in flexible distance learning, with a mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.
What Will I Learn?
- Explore the different types of personal investments and the returns they offer
- Identify and to understand the key investment management theories
- Identify investment management practices
- Explore and review recent investment management stories
- Identify and to understand the impact of behavioural factors on investment decision-making
Topics for this course
The importance of personal investments
Introduction to investments and investment planning00:02:02
Meet the team
Savings and investments
Why should we save and invest?
Why are savings and investments important for the economy?00:06:19
Investment planning needs a long-term perspective
Variable rate and fixed rate savings products
Why savings rates differ
Savings accounts – are there risks?00:01:20
Shares
Bonds and funds
Alternative investments, tax, advice and the costs of investing
Money management is a must for everyone. Money can never be put there more and more, but if we understand the rational investment, then we will have more and more money. This course is worth learning by all of us. Because we all need to learn how to invest wisely and manage our finances wisely.
If you want to learn how to invest, how to plan your investments. Then this course is perfect for you. It can teach you how to avoid risk, how to invest for the long term. Good course.
I really like the use of historical investment events in the course to tell us about investment returns and various risks. Investment skills that allow us to gain success from previous experience. That's great.
In this course, I learned about investment options and the risks and returns of each investment. Investment strategy and risk-return preference; And behavior that may impair effective investment decisions. Great for learning as a novice investor.