Enhance Your Financial Portfolio Management Skills With Coursera

This is an online self-paced certification course taught by Arzu Ozugas, Professor of Finance at the University of North Carolina’s Business School. This course is one of the many offered under the Investment and Portfolio Management Specialization. The course provides in-depth knowledge of the basics of portfolio performance measures, risks, and investment styles (Active and Passive), along with portfolio investment strategies. 

I also found this course really helpful in order to kick start the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level-1 preparation as it covers the major portions of the investment management and portfolio management section of CFA L-1 syllabus. It also covers the topic of asset allocation and performance attribution with numerous examples and has a good set of quizzes and peer-grade assignments. This is an introductory course and does not require the learner to have any prerequisite qualification.

Completing this course can take you around 30 days. It is very well structured and begins with the very basics of financial terms like risk, returns and various metrics, and gradually scales up to topics like performance evaluation and the different types of investing. The course has 3 modules with around 3 quizzes in each module. The module-wise assignments are peer-graded. 

One challenge I faced while attempting the quizzes was identifying the questions with wrong answers. However, the quizzes are of a very good standard and cover the majority of the concepts taught. The quizzes at the end of each module cover most of the concepts taught in the videos. Further, the assignments are quite exhaustive and very well formulated. 

There is no limit on the number of attempts for the quiz or assignment. However, there is a freeze period of certain hours after 3 failed attempts post which the learner can again attempt the quiz. No study material was provided as the slides were enough for one to pass the quiz.

I am currently working as a Consultant at Cognizant, where I need to analyze several forms of data, including financial data. The return and risk metrics explained in the course helped me understand and do my daily work without challenges. Besides, financial portfolio management and diversification techniques are extremely useful today.

This is a very important course if you are someone who is looking for a job in domains like risk management, financial analysis, portfolio management, investment management and portfolio analysis. Besides, it will also help you prepare for the CFA L-1 exam.

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