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Advanced Financial Analysis

From corporate governance to currency crises, from DCF valuation to the political economy of austerity — build the analytical tools of Aswath Damodaran and understand whose interests they serve through the lens of Mark Blyth. CFA Level 2 rigor meets political economy.

18 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

What Is a Corporation For?

The modern corporation is the most powerful institution on earth. Who it serves is not an economic question. It is a political one -- and the answer changes depending on which country you are standing in.

The Price of Risk

Wall Street has a formula for the price of risk. It is elegant, internally consistent, and wrong in exactly the ways that matter most. Understanding both its power and its blindness is the beginning of financial literacy.

Lab: The NIH Grant Crisis

A mid-size biotech non-profit just lost $3.2 million in NIH grants. Forty-seven jobs hang in the balance. The spreadsheets tell one story. The human costs tell another. Your job is to make decisions that honor both.

The Language of Accounting

Financial statements are not mirrors reflecting economic reality. They are portraits painted within rules that different countries set differently, and the portrait artist has every incentive to flatter the subject.

Discounted Cash Flow: The Engine Room

The discounted cash flow model is the most important tool in finance and the most dangerous. It gives the illusion of precision to an exercise that is fundamentally about judgment, and the people making those judgments have interests that the model does not disclose.

Relative Valuation: The Art of Comparison

Most valuations in the real world are not discounted cash flows. They are comparisons. This company is worth 15 times earnings because its peers trade at 15 times. But that reasoning is circular unless you understand what drives multiples -- and who picks the peers.

Valuing the Difficult

Standard models break for the most interesting companies -- the ones with no earnings, no history, or no future. When the spreadsheet fails, the analyst must think. And thinking about the difficult cases reveals what valuation really is: a structured confrontation with uncertainty.

The Narrative and Numbers

Every valuation is a story converted into numbers. The story comes first. The numbers follow. If you do not examine the story, the numbers are meaningless -- and the storytellers know this better than the listeners.

Equity Markets: Structure, Access, and the Illusion of Efficiency

Markets are supposed to be efficient mechanisms for price discovery. But someone designed them. This unit asks who, and why the answer matters more than any stock tip ever could.

The Bond Market: Where Power Lives

James Carville wanted to come back as the bond market because it can intimidate everybody. This unit explains why he was right, and what that means for democracy.

Derivatives: Weapons of Mass Destruction or Tools of Civilization?

Warren Buffett called them weapons of mass destruction. But farmers use them to lock in crop prices. The question is not whether derivatives are dangerous, but who uses them and who pays when things go wrong.

Alternative Investments and the Shadow Banking System

There is a financial system you can see -- banks, stock exchanges, regulators. And there is a shadow system that is larger, less regulated, and arguably more powerful. This unit maps both.

Currency Markets and the Impossible Trinity

Every country's currency tells a political story. The dollar's dominance was built by Bretton Woods, sustained by military power, and challenged by everyone from De Gaulle to Xi Jinping. Welcome to the most political market on earth.

Cross-Border Valuation and Value Arbitrage

Valuing a company in the US is hard enough. Now imagine valuing the same company listed in New York AND London — at different prices. Welcome to cross-border valuation, where geography becomes destiny.

Portfolio Construction and Factor Investing

Harry Markowitz won a Nobel Prize for showing that diversification is the only 'free lunch' in finance. But whose lunch is it? And who's paying for it?

Austerity, Crisis, and the Political Economy of Finance

THIS IS THE UNIT. Mark Blyth's central argument: the 2008 crisis was caused by banks, but the bill was sent to citizens through austerity. That's the bait and switch.

Choosing Your Philosophy

You've spent 16 units building analytical tools and understanding whose interests they serve. Now the question becomes personal: what kind of investor — what kind of economic actor — will you be?

Appendix: Quantitative Methods Review

This is your toolkit. The concepts below are used throughout the course. Return here whenever the math feels unfamiliar.

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.