Welcome to a dimension full of intrigue, mystery and adventure...

Understanding Investing is more than a course about investing: It is a fascinating journey through space and time during which you will meet many incredible personalities, both real and fictitious, and learn not only about their remarkable tales but also their investment exploits and the decision-making process they adopt - and its consequences! 

Let's begin this journey with our brief video as your personal tour guide. So before you read another word, sit back and enjoy our introduction to Understanding Investing!

UI+ is our "nuts-n-bolts package. This includes all the benefits of UI but with the addition of our Learning Lounge. This specialised area is created especially for those curious - if not inquisitive - individuals who like to delve deep and reach for the nuts and bolts of a subject. Here we dissect each topic through formulas, analysis, commentary and examples to shed light on its nuances and subtleties and how these come into play in real life.

Why not fly on the wings of your imagination and enter our Isaac Newton Lounge for some inspirational study time? Or come and marvel a while at the magnificence of the 10th Century Royal Library of Cordoba while you lose yourself among its 400,000 books….

UI is our standard package. Here, you will have access to all six of our colourful coursework "Stations" and your travel pass will entitle you to take a tour of our imaginary city whenever it suits you. In this journey, you will meet many remarkable personalities, such as Gauss, Bernoulli, Cervantes, Markowitz, Medici and Hypatia, each of whom will unfold for you a different aspect of the mysteries of this fascinating subject we call investing! 

You will also have full access to our comprehensive question bank and will be able to take the interactive quizzes from each Station at a leisurely pace, whenever and as many times as you like, without being formally scored. Then, when you are ready, you can take our assessment to test the knowledge you have gained and, upon successful passing, to receive your certificate of completion. 

Understanding the Magic Black Box is a revealing glimpse into an essential tool of our study program: The silent engine which operates tirelessly behind the scenes, generating the dynamic numbers which allow us to create a lively variety of graphs, tables and diagrams for illustrating or elaborating key investment concepts and ideas.

Our Black Box is more than a mere curiosity, a mysterious automaton churning out numbers; that would be a simplistic characterisation of its invaluable contributions to this course. Indeed, we call it the "Magic" Black Box because of its diverse abilities and talents, from generating random numbers to support our visualisation efforts to performing simulations and producing probabilistic scenarios and forecasts. The Black Box is a versatile computational tool which helps us in our aim of demystifying a subject which for many is shrouded in mystery! 

To add to your learning experience, in this package you will also have access to our "Learning Lounge", which is designed for those who wish to delve deeper into a subject and get to know its nuts and bolts, so to speak!

Understanding Portfolio Construction is the stage on which all the actors introduced in Modules 1-4 can interact and perform! In this gathering, risk and return take on new personas and asset classes begin to behave in a manner that is different to when they were in isolation: Normally rambunctious stocks can metamorphose and exert a moderating influence on the crowd while introverted bonds can emerge as the catalyst for many a convivial conversation.

We could say that asset classes are social animals and their personality transforms in a portfolio setting! If we are invited to this gathering, then our preferences as to which of these characters we wish to mingle with, in what combination and for how long will add yet another dimension to the complexity.

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) describes these transformations, interactions and permutations in the context of an investment portfolio. One peculiarity is that adding a risky asset to a portfolio could actually reduce overall risk, a phenomenon which for many may seem counter-intuitive. Another key insight is that a portfolio containing two or more risky assets can be engineered in such a way as to maximise return for a given level of risk or minimise risk for a given level of return. There is only a finite set of portfolios which can be constructed in this fashion and collectively, these trace out a magical curve referred to as the Efficient Frontier.  Welcome to the alchemist's corner!

To add to your learning experience, in this package you will also have access to our "Learning Lounge", which is designed for those who wish to delve deeper into a subject and get to know its nuts and bolts, so to speak!

Understanding the Magic Black Box is a revealing glimpse into an essential tool of our study program: The silent engine which operates tirelessly behind the scenes, generating the dynamic numbers which allow us to create a lively variety of graphs, tables and diagrams for illustrating or elaborating key investment concepts and ideas.

Our Black Box is more than a mere curiosity, a mysterious automaton churning out numbers; that would be a simplistic characterisation of its invaluable contributions to this course. Indeed, we call it the "Magic" Black Box because of its diverse abilities and talents, from generating random numbers to support our visualisation efforts to performing simulations and producing probabilistic scenarios and forecasts. The Black Box is a versatile computational tool which helps us in our aim of demystifying a subject which for many is shrouded in mystery!