Investing Fundamentals

The concepts underneath every portfolio decision: risk and return, diversification, asset allocation, dollar-cost averaging, compounding, and the academic theories — efficient markets, CAPM — that explain why simple strategies are so hard to beat.

1
What Is Investing?
What investing actually means, how it differs from saving and from trading, why inflation forces the issue, and the tradeoff underneath every choice.
2
Types of Investments
The main asset classes — stocks, bonds, and cash — plus the fund wrappers and alternatives built around them, and how risk and return climb the ladder together.
3
The Power of Compounding
How returns earning returns turn time into investing's most powerful input — the Rule of 72, why starting early beats investing more, and how fees compound too.
4
Risk and Return
Risk is the price of return. What risk actually means in markets, the risk-free baseline, the risk premium — and why "high return, no risk" is always a lie.
5
The Types of Investment Risk
Investment risk comes in types — market, business, interest-rate, inflation, liquidity, currency, concentration — and one crucial split: diversifiable or not.
6
Know Your Risk Tolerance
Risk capacity is math; risk tolerance is temperament. How to assess both honestly — before a bear market does it — and turn the answer into an allocation.
7
Diversification
Why diversification is called the only free lunch in investing — the correlation math that makes it work, how much is enough, and where its protection stops.
8
Asset Allocation
The stock/bond/cash split drives more of your outcome than any stock pick. Set an allocation from horizon and temperament — and keep it with rebalancing.
9
Dollar-Cost Averaging
Investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule buys more shares when prices are low — and removes the timing decision entirely. What DCA does and doesn't do.
10
The Efficient Market Hypothesis
Fama's claim that prices already reflect available information — the weak, semi-strong and strong forms, the random-walk idea, and the evidence on both sides.
11
Modern Portfolio Theory and CAPM
Markowitz's insight that portfolio risk isn't the sum of its parts, the efficient frontier, and CAPM's beta — the mathematics behind diversification.

Investing Fundamentals

Every investing mistake has already been made, catalogued, and explained — usually decades ago. Buying what just went up, selling in a panic, betting everything on one stock, chasing a "can't-lose" return: these aren't new errors, they're violations of a handful of principles that have been understood since before most of today's investors were born. This course is investing 101 in the proper sense — not a tour of apps and tickers, but the eleven concepts underneath every portfolio decision: what investing actually is, how compounding turns time into money, what risk really means and how much of it you can genuinely carry, why diversification is the closest thing markets offer to a free lunch, and the academic theories — efficient markets, portfolio theory, CAPM — that explain the most surprising fact in finance: why simple, boring strategies are so persistently hard to beat.

The lessons build in order. The first three establish what investing is and why time matters more than talent. The middle of the course is risk — what forms it takes, how to measure your own tolerance for it honestly, and the two tools (diversification and asset allocation) that manage it. The final lessons cover the theory that won its authors Nobel prizes and quietly runs every index fund and target-date fund in your retirement account. Nothing here requires math beyond arithmetic, and none of it goes out of date, because none of it depends on what the market did this week. If you haven't yet, start with Stock Market Basics — this course assumes you know what a stock is and builds upward from there.