Personal Finance for Engineers (CS 007) is a new course being offered during the 2017-8 academic year at Stanford University. Led by MBA (and Stanford graduate) Adam Nash, the class explores real-life situations using the latest info from behavioral finance and practical statistics. (Here are Nash's thoughts about the first class, including a survey of his students.)
Nash is making his lecture notes available via Slideshare. Here are links to the sessions that have been completed:
- Week one: Introduction and overview
- Week two: Predictably irrational
- Week three: Getting paid
- Week four: Spend less than you make
- Week five: Your financial profile
- Week six: All about debt
- Week seven: Good investing is boring
- Week eight: Financial planning and goals
Here, for instance, are the slides from the seventh lecture, “Good investing is boring”.
Future sessions of the class will cover topics such as real estate and taxes.
Super cool. I like the outline, and feel like catering it to engineers is smart – but likely underserves others who would also benefit from the class but may be intimidated by the name of it. Skimmed through the first overview week slides and it looks like I’d have enjoyed taking it haha
This comment isn’t meant to be a trolling assault on the “1%”, but a slide from week one shows 92% of his class at Stanford will have no student debt obligation upon graduation was a little jaw dropping. That’s quite a substantial headstart these kids will have versus the “average” college graduate in the US with an average of $31k in loan obligations.
Shame using the discredited Dalbar data. The concept of investors underperforming begs the question who is on the other side of their trades outperforming. The main difference for performance is the math of time weighted returns vs dollar weighted. Other, more reputable sources have found the investor performance shortfall to be far less. Still, unquestionably deleterious performance chasing exists – by individual and professional investors!