📖 Yale courses I did and highly recommend - Education, a new section inside Maverick Equity Research

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.” Charlie Munger

Maverick Equity Research

Feb 24, 2024

Dear all,

2024 comes with a new section within Maverick Equity Research, namely Education.

It will be a place where I will cover it inside-out, meaning:

external - great learning resources I undertook like courses, books and research
internal - my own ‘teachings’ from my real world practical experience & mistakes: food for thought, subjects that are thought provoking, clarifying confusions and myths about investing, finance and economics … opening new perspectives …

Do I know it all? For sure not. Will I ever know it all? For sure not! Is there anybody that does? For sure not, though quite some would act as if, pay them no mind, clowns!

In general, we should all strive to learn and see ourselves as students of life, there is always something, somebody to learn from, hence I truly believe in lifelong learning for personal and professional development. Then when we form a view about a topic, debate with people with the idea to have a constructive and honest debate where the ultimate goal is to find the most likely scenario or the actual truth. At some point you will see, time will simply discover it and it will simply show up apparently from nowhere, dots will get connected and insights will be won.

Education is key, it’s what nobody can take away from you. Over the long run, it produces one of the best compounding results that you can think of. Job titles, corporate positions, career tracks are with ups & downs, sometimes taken away just via bad luck or office politics, but your knowledge & skills are always there for you.

We have no shortage of learning and development resources nowadays: people and their experiences, our working environment and communities, books, the internet = ‘the great equaliser’ where one can dive into any topic and get many ‘A-ha’ moments, develop, meet great people and even create joint-ventures or own businesses.

Before anything, 2 of my favourite quotes on education by 2 of the greatest out there:

Charlie Munger:

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.”

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time.”

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”

Warren Buffett:

“If you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years.”,

“The best investment you can make, is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you'll earn”. “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business."

So, let’s start with my top online educational platform that I have been using for years, Coursera! I talked with plenty of professionals across the years and they did not know about Coursera, while they were all impressed once they checked it and saw what a privilege is that today we can get world-class education via just 1-click!

Coursera envisions a world where anyone, anywhere can transform their life by accessing the world’s best learning experience. More than 80 million learners use Coursera to take courses offered by top universities like Yale, Stanford, and Duke and top companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Coursera works with universities and corporations to offer online courses, certifications, and degrees in a big variety of subjects … .

I did more than 30 courses and 4 specialisations via Coursera across time, and nowadays great to affiliate with such a great educational platform, check it out!

My latest 2 courses from Yale University were on my list for a while and in between Christmas and after New Years Eve I was glad to find the time and peace to complete.

Narrative Economics, from the one and only Nobel prize winner, Robert Shiller!

I am a big fan of Professor Shiller, one of a kind with a unique way to distill complex topics and explain them to a wide audience that will gain very valuable insights!

short course, you will get it done + a certificate with your name in 5-7 hours, and this was definitely the course with my highest ever insight/time ratio
Narrative Economics is a new field which focuses on the human side of Economics: how stories go viral, how narratives spread and become part of the public consciousness, hence drive social and economic behaviour
Professor Shiller, proposes studying these narratives — stories — as the most important thing we can do now to improve economic forecasts, inform major economic decisions and understand economic events

Complementary, 2 short videos as intro to the course from Professor Shiller himself:

Complementary, a 8 minute YouTube video on the Narrative Economics field itself which explains a lot via the role of narratives both the 1930s Great Depression and the 2007-2009 Great Financial Crisis. Naturally, the video is also a great preview what you will find inside the course per se …

If my short review and Professor Shiller’s previews convinced you, I personally highly recommend you take the course, you will not regret it! Narrative Economics will not just contribute to your investing journey, but also to your understanding of the day by day social and economical behaviour that shape the societies we live in.

After, it would be great of us debating and debunking both the narratives we saw in the past (even laugh about ourselves how could we believe this or that) and nowadays. I have seen many in the past & see plenty nowadays, and you will too once you are very aware how much is substance & how much is more like a story, a narrative that many pile into, and ultimately, when, how and why people and investors change their mind.

And this is how a sample verified course certificate looks like should you pursue it!

While my personal verified certificate for this specific great Narrative Economics course which I did complete just recently in December 2023 looks like this (scribbled my name, for why I prefer to be anonymous you can read more in the ‘About’ section):

Financial Markets, from Yale’s professor Shiller as well!

this course is about 30-40 hours, and though said to be as a Beginner level, even experienced folks will benefit a lot … conceptually there was nothing new for me, but there is something about Shiller’s teaching that makes me connect many dots
Professor Shiller course intro says it quite all:

‘Finance is not about making money, or in some sense it is, but I do not see it that way! We all have our purposes, it’s part of human nature to settle on some goal or idea for us, usually that isn’t making money, making things happen is what I think finance ought to be about!’

Verified course certificate completed just recently in January 2024. Note, this course has a ‘With Honors’ distinction which you get when you complete honors assignments.

The Global Financial Crisis, also from Yale and this time offered via both the academia and professional side: professor Andrew Metrick & Timothy Geithner, former Secretary of the Treasury that served from Jan 26, 2009 to Jan 25, 2013 as he took office in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

this course is about 60-70 hours and definitely one of the best coverages on the 2007-2009 subprime mortgage crisis which caused the biggest recession since the Great Depression from the 1930s
topic was also the subject of my 2009 university thesis, hence I was very curious for some extra reflections & insights that clearly did further connect my key dots

Complementary, intro to the course from Mr. Metrick and Mr. Geithner:

the course was done 8 years ago, yet the great thing about it is that it keeps getting updated, the latest being in 2023 with the 2nd largest bank failure in the history of the US - the case of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and its resolution

Verified course certificate completed many years ago, namely 2018.

Fun fact: as I did many courses and got all the correspondent certificates, in the vast majority of cases they were a big advantage at job interviews. However, I have to note one where it was a big disadvantage: the manager actually bashed them … instead of discussing the content, the job, my experience, the courses per se he got stuck on my lifelong educational and professional development which was puzzling … at first … .

I never got the job and glad I didn’t: later I found the ‘hot shot’ was just a talking head which got kicked out shortly after. Nobody knows how he got there in the first place. Well, it is known, it’s by mastering the office politics aka ‘the art of bullshit’ and basically he felt emasculated/intimidated by people that do study, make progress, do their best and … know at least something. Don’t get discouraged if that ever happens to you, you do not want to be surrounded by a manager & colleagues like that, you will with time become the same most probably … with whom you spend 8-10 hours a day each day it is impossible not to have an influence (both good or bad) on you in time, and that is no matter how much of a ‘Maverick’ you are or not … .

Sometimes you have to take the loss on the short term (quit/not get a job, lose money, leave some old friends behind etc) so that you are not dragged down, and hence can thrive on the medium-long term. This is valid unless you are very lucky and never have this situation, but on a bound of probabilities, you will, so be prepared!

Keep making progress, we tend to overestimate what we can do in 1 year, and underestimate what we can do in 5-10 … knowledge compounds! Do it!

Hope you found this interesting and useful. Next time I will tell you more about both other various courses I did complete, and that I am currently studying via Coursera! The lifelong learning and professional development is on ! It’s yours to embark on!

Many courses and lectures are free, while for the full experience, meaning quizzes, assignments, exams and certificates, fees are by individual course ($29 – $99 range), specialisation (US$39-79 per month) or degree (varies by institution, length etc).

A popular learning package is via Coursera Plus where one has unlimited access to 7,000+ world-class courses, hands-on projects, and job-ready certificate programs - all included in the yearly subscription: