Financial modeling online course

Question

Hi everyone!

I recently accepted an offer to join a top-tier strategy firm and I have some time before starting. One thing I'd like to do is getting up-to-speed with financial modeling. Apart from Training the Street, which I find rather expensive, do you have any other recommended online course?

Thanks!

Answer 1

hello!

For sure! Here are some good ones I can recommend:

Finance & Quantitative Modeling for Analysts https://www.coursera.org/specializations/finance-quantitative-modeling-analysts#about This is good if you are a beginner. What I like about this one is that you will be creating your own model as part of the course (financial modelling is all about learning by doing)
Excel Skills for Business Specialization https://www.coursera.org/specializations/excel This one is also good for beginners – it gives you an overview of how to work with big data sets (like using vlookup)
Excel Skills for Business: Advanced https://www.coursera.org/learn/excel-advanced#syllabus As the name says it, it's for a bit more advanced excel users. It gives a lot of best practice recommnedations on how to design your models (keeping spreadsheets clean, data organization, etc.)

I've read on the news the other day that Coursera also gives free access to their courses to everybody who is now on quarantine, so if you are in one of the quarantined countries, you are lucky – in some sense :)

Answer 2

Hello, congrats on the offer!

It´s great you want to spend some time on this, and even better now half of the world is locked down...

My recommendation would be:

Excel & financial modeling > Training The Street (e.g., Financial Modeling, Valuation, pivot tables, statistics tools, etc.) Sucess here would be to forget your mouse and do everything with your keyboard.
Power Point (This is also sooooooooo important) > Read "Say it with charts" and "Pyramid Principle" and try to replicate later good presentations in PPTX (e.g., you can take any of the ones published in McKinsey Global Institute that are also a fanctastic read!)

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

Answer 3

Hi, congrats for the offer!
I confirm the material suggested here by the coaches is great. However, I recommend not struggling too much with preparation, since you are not supposed to be an expert of modeling and you'll have a huge amount of time on the ground to learn it. Enjoy this period :)

Antonello