About this event

Edinburgh Business School has teamed up with leading financial market strategist, Professor Russell Napier, Keeper of the world-famous Library of Mistakes, to bring an online version of his award winning programme Advanced Valuation in Financial Markets, which has now been running for over 20 years, to your laptop/phone/device.

Written and presented by leading academics, senior economists and investment practitioners, the course contains over 20 hours of video and covers key areas including equity valuations, economics, behavioural finance and liquidity.

On completion you will be able to:

Critically evaluate different methods of valuing stock markets and identify faults in the valuation methods.
Explain the idea of mean reversion in financial markets and identify valuation techniques that follow mean reversion using data from the last 100 years to demonstrate this.
Understand the impact inflationary or deflationary forces have on the returns to different classes of financial assets.
Understand the impact liquidity and the supply of money has on stock market returns over time.
Understand the impact of psychological biases on returns in the stock market and the role that they can play in major stock market events.
Critically evaluate the lessons from the history of the financial markets over the past 200 years or more

Module 1 Value and Expected Returns

Derry Pickford starts us off with a look through the successes and failures over the last 200 years in equity valuation. Tackling key questions such as "what does value mean?", Derry ultimately invites us to consider what makes a good indicator of value, and crucially what do the data tell us about the state of stock markets today.

Module 2 The Monetary Theory of Asset Prices

Any study of financial markets must include a look at monetary policy and liquidity. In this session, John Greenwood presents the monetary theory of asset prices, pointing out that what happens to securities such as equities, bonds, real estate and commodities is very much part of the business cycle, and determined by the money creation activities of governments and commercial banks.

Module 3 Behavioural Finance

What good is financial theory if we abstract out the psychological element? Herman Brodie’s approach to behavioural finance is an important part of the jigsaw in understanding what drives valuations. Investment managers and the general public can all be affected by the biases that deflect us from determining true value, and this module is centred on how this theory can provide practical information with which to value financial markets.

Module 4 Investing in Differing Inflationary Climates

Inflation and deflation are key determinants in the value of securities, and this module is an exploration of investing in different inflationary situations and climates. With a timespan covering the entirety of the 20th century and into the 21st, we are led through periods of extreme inflation and extreme deflation – and even cases of wartime hyperinflation. What we learn is that investor returns can vary hugely depending on the inflationary background.

Module 5 The Mean Reversion of Equity Valuations – Past, Present and Future

Course Director Prof. Russell Napier brings everything together in our final module, with half of the time spent exploring how the key forces driving the mean reversion of equity valuations interact. The rest of the module is forward-looking, anticipating where valuations may go and the drivers of financial market valuations in coming years.

Cost:

The course costs £999

Format and scheduling

The course is entirely video content. You can engage with it at any time through any device. Please note that due to the way Eventbrite is set up you will need to choose an access date - please just choose any day - this is arbitrary, and you will receive access as soon as you are registered for the course.

After you have paid for the programme you will receive a registration email from Heriot Watt University which will enable you to access the platform and the course. Please note that due to the registration process of the university this email is not immediate.

Please note The University is closed from 13:00 on the 23rd December until 3rd January 2025. If you purchase the course during this time access will not be granted until the University reopens in the new year.

For more information, please email Louisa Osmond. Head of Executive Education at Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University l.osmond@hw.ac.uk

Advanced Valuation in Financial Markets - Investment Course