Finguard Markets · markets & instruments

Understand financial markets.

A hands-on course on how markets and instruments actually work — the time value of money, bonds and interest rates, stocks and trading, valuation, risk and portfolios, and derivatives. Built around figures you can manipulate, with real in-browser math. It starts from zero and ramps to genuinely advanced.

8
units
75
lessons
Beginner→Adv.
no prerequisites
Interactive figure · the magic of compounding

$1,000 invested, left to grow. Each bar is 10 years — watch the curve bend.

After 40 years: · that's your money

A real idea from Unit 1. Drag the return.

A price is just a number. A market is a machine for turning information into one.

Why is a bond worth what it's worth? What does a stock price actually claim? Why does diversification reduce risk for free, and what is an option really? This course answers those questions from first principles — and lets you turn the dials yourself until the answers feel obvious.

What you'll learn

From a single dollar to a derivatives book.

01

Money & interest

The time value of money — compounding, discounting, real vs. nominal rates — and the bond market it underpins: pricing, yield to maturity, the yield curve, and duration risk.

02

Stocks & valuation

What a share is and how a trade really happens through the order book, then how to value a company: discounted cash flow, the dividend discount model, multiples, and honest sensitivity analysis.

03

Portfolios & derivatives

Risk and return, diversification, the efficient frontier and the CAPM — then forwards, futures, and options: payoffs, strategies, Black–Scholes intuition, and the Greeks. Finishing with how markets really behave.

The curriculum

Eight units, beginner to advanced.

Every unit is live, with 75 interactive lessons across 8 units — each built around original figures you can manipulate, with real in-browser math.

01
The Time Value of Money
Compounding and future value, discounting and present value, real vs. nominal interest rates and APR vs. APY, and valuing whole streams of cash flows — annuities, perpetuities, and loan amortization.
Available now
02
Interest Rates & the Bond Market
A bond as a present value: coupons and face value, yield to maturity, the price–yield see-saw, the shape and signal of the yield curve, and interest-rate risk through duration and convexity.
Available now
03
Equities: Stocks & How Markets Trade
What you own when you own a share, returns and dividends, and the plumbing of a trade: the order book, bid–ask spread, market vs. limit orders, liquidity and slippage, and market-cap-weighted indices.
Available now
04
Valuation: What Is a Stock Worth?
Price versus value. Discounted cash flow and the dividend discount model from scratch, relative valuation with P/E and other multiples, and the sensitivity analysis that reveals how fragile any single number is.
Available now
05
Risk & Return
Expected return and volatility, the distribution of returns and its fat tails, covariance and correlation, and why combining imperfectly correlated assets is the closest thing to a free lunch in finance.
Available now
06
Portfolio Theory & the CAPM
The efficient frontier, the capital market line once a risk-free asset exists, systematic vs. idiosyncratic risk and beta, the CAPM and the security market line, and performance through the Sharpe ratio.
Available now
07
Derivatives: Forwards, Futures & Options
Contracts whose value derives from something else: forwards and futures and cost-of-carry, call and put payoffs, option strategies, what drives an option's price, and the Greeks that measure its sensitivities.
Available now
08
Market Structure, Efficiency & Risk
How modern markets work — exchanges, market makers, electronic trading — the efficient-market hypothesis and its critics, bubbles and behavioral finance, and measuring market risk with volatility and VaR.
Available now
Before you start

No prerequisites. We start from zero.

You don't need any finance background, and you won't be asked to write code. If you can read a chart and move a slider, you can take this course. Comfort with high-school arithmetic is plenty — every formula is built up from an idea first, then made interactive.

Who it's for

Beginners who want to truly understand investing Students of finance & economics Engineers & analysts moving into fintech Anyone preparing for finance interviews
Begin

Learn how markets price money, risk, and time.

No account, no install. Progress saves automatically in your browser, separate from your other courses.