Training firmS
There are lots of professional training firms and they have the advantage that they are used by the investment banks to train graduates. They generally are competent at this level but are focused on providing a basic set of skills of universal application across a large bank – they are less focused on equity investing than many of the other participants reviewed here.
Again, we offer a cursory examination of a few firms we have some understanding of:
Financial Edge
Fitch Learning
Wall St Oasis
Wall St Prep
Financial Edge
This firm has a good website and offers a wide range of courses. One of their specialties is modelling and they have a wide set of online courses – some 62 when we looked.
The Portfolio Manager course appears to have been reduced from £659 to from £449p.a. It is 67.5 hours, although they don’t specify what. The longest section is The Accountant which is 13 hours and includes under 7 hours of video, including a 68 minute intro to full consolidation. Why this would be considered relevant for a PM is beyond us. The sections are as follows:
Portfolio manager expert interview
The investment management industry
Economic analysis & asset allocation
Security selection
The accountant
The modeler
The valuer
The equities trader
The FICC trader
Performance measurement
The first section is an expert interview with John Correia. He appears to have joined Blair Hall Advisors in 2016 which Wallmine reports as a Seattle firm with $47m AUM.
We have no doubt that Financial Edge are competent at training graduates but the courses have the appearance of including anything which might be vaguely relevant. It looks like they just dip into their inventory of online content. Much better, we feel would be a custom designed course specifically aimed at equipping students with the skills they need.
We should emphasise that we have not taken any of the courses and we don’t know what’s inside – we are merely describing what it says on the tin. And as long as there is sufficient relevant content, and as long as the price point is competitive, having additional material you don’t need and won’t use isn’t a big issue.
Fitch Learning
They provide both online content and physical public courses which can be attended by anyone for that role. A two day course in New York looking at credit funds costs over $3k. In their online content, the CFA Level 1 program is £695 with an additional question bank at a further £250. We would imagine that this would be a competitive offer if you wanted to do the CFA but we would ask why when there are many better, more practical alternatives out there.
Wall Street Oasis
Quite a punchy opening line on the website:
“As part of WSO Academy, we guarantee you at least one offer in a high finance role or your money back.”
We imagine that much might depend on your definition of high finance. Some of these training firms are very punchy in their marketing, more like courses for day traders than those looking for a Wall St role as an equity analyst.
They also offer various modelling classes including LBO Modelling, DCF modelling, VBA Macros in Excel and Powerpoint courses. We would look at the number of reviews, the price points and see if there is a money back guarantee, before deciding on a supplier. We imagine that most are fairly similar.
Wall Street Prep
This is a modelling based portal with a valuation and premium modelling package priced at a hefty $499 and a more basic modelling package at $199. There are a number of operators out there which started teaching modelling and then added on accounting and valuation and similar courses which would be a logical trade-up for their customers.
We have heard good things about courses with interview prep and soft skills and paying $99 for 1000 investment banking questions isn’t a bad idea if one of them comes up, but we are not sure how many of the 1000 we would remember the answers to. Similarly, the $39 accounting crash course is probably worth $39 and we would rather pay more and get deeper instruction.
These types of firms probably are good for modelling and other specialists might be better at the accounting and valuation side.