BSNS 600V - The Investment Training Program: Strategies for Smart Investments

Course Description

At its simplest, investing is the act of using today’s financial resources to achieve higher financial gains tomorrow. Though the concept is simple, the process can be intimidating – but it doesn’t have to be.

This course will teach you how to make informed and data-driven decisions in an uncertain market. You’ll explore the five major elements of investment: risk, return, time, probability, and expectations for the future. Through this framework, you'll learn how to analyze a potential investment and maximize the probability of long-term investment success - in short, to make investment "bets” with a high probability of paying off in the future.

In addition to learning the practical mathematics of finance, you'll explore the psychology of investment: the influence of psychological factors on your own decision-making processes and behaviours, and how these same psychological factors influence other investors and the market as a whole. Ensuring good returns over a lifetime of investment is a simple matter of mathematics; acting with discipline on those strategies can be another matter. You’ll learn to better understand your own thinking about money management and financial trading, and how to identify your own biases, emotional responses, and mental shortcuts. By recognizing the role of the head and the heart in making complex financial decisions, you’ll be more able to make decisions rooted in your understanding of the markets and your own needs, and improve your odds of success in building financial security.

The goal of this education is to offer a fully objective understanding of the processes and options that are available to the “normal investor” to allow to make sound financial choices, regardless of their current financial circumstances, and to allow learners to take control of their financial futures.

Who Should Take This Course:

This course is designed for people at any life stage who are intellectually curious about finance, investment and money matters, and are learning to expand their capacity to take charge of their financial lives. The content of this course will teach them the fundamental concepts of:

• robust money management, backed by 100 years of Nobel Prize-winning academic research
• passive and active investment practice
• behavioral finance

Learner Outcomes

By the end of this program, learners will be able to:

• Understand the process of investment
• Identify components of risk
• Describe the differences between RRSPs, TFSAs, and other common financial products
• Describe various retirement-planning strategies and products, including CPP, pension plans, and savings plans
• Describe psychological factors that affect financial choices, including leading theories, personal biases, and common misunderstandings
• Describe the difference between active and passive investments
• Recognize the psychological factors that affect financial decision-making
• Understand the processes involved in investment, including the role the banks, the Bank of Canada, and the government; the tasks required of the investor; and the mechanics of investment markets
• Create and act on a financial plan that will allow them to save for retirement, home ownership, and other major life goals