Fundamentals of Investing

Cost
₱30,000 PHP₱25,000 PHP
Course Dates
Open now, starts January 2025
Schedule
4 sessions, every Sat
Location
BGC

Learn investing from experienced investors.

In this course, you’ll learn how to invest the right way. First, we’ll study different investment options and how they fit with your personal financial goals. Then we’ll go in-depth into fundamental analysis of stocks. We’ll focus on US stocks, and only touch on Philippine stocks, because we believe your money will grow faster in US equities – and it’s easy to invest in US stocks these days! We’ll wrap up the course by learning how to construct a portfolio using everything you’ve learned about the different investment options and asset classes.

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Our pool of instructors

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Anthony De Guzman

Co-founder, Accel Institute
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What you'll learn

You’ve finally started earning beyond your daily expenses, and you watch your bank account fill up with unused cash. Should you start thinking about investing? How? It’s critical to step back and evaluate your own financial context before diving into investing. In this course, we will start with a holistic perspective of personal finance and help you evaluate your financial health. Then we will provide frameworks to help you develop an investment strategy that aligns with your financial situation and personal goals, as well as an overview of traditional and alternative investment assets.
By the end of the session, you will understand:
  • The key components to your personal financial health
  • How to create and maintain your personal balance sheet
  • Goals-based investing and designing your own investment portfolio using it
  • An overview of the investment asset spectrum, from least to most risky
In this session and the next, you will learn the proper fundamentals of investing in stocks. We will break down fundamental analysis and learn each step, with a focus on industry-level and company-level analysis in this session. We will seek to answer two primary questions: “What makes a good business?”, and “What makes a good stock?”. Meanwhile, macro-level analysis will be covered in-depth in the next session.
By the end of the session, you will know:
  • The different types of stock investing you can do (US vs. PH, funds vs. individual stocks, long vs. short, value vs. growth)
  • The components of fundamental analysis: industry, company, and macro-level analyses
  • How to do industry-level analysis – value vs. growth industries, evaluating an industry’s structure & its sectors, strategic positioning of companies within an industry
  • How to do company-level analysis – evaluating the stock price and the valuation multiples relative to key financial metrics
In this session, we will unpack and simplify the complex relationships & interdependencies between macroeconomic factors and the stock market. We will take a practical approach and prioritize the most important factors to pay attention to, and put stock investing in the context of how the overall financial system works. We will also discuss a select few of the biggest economic & financial events of the past 30 years, to ensure that the investing approach you develop as you learn in class is not merely based on bull market phenomena of the last 15 years, but instead will stand the test of time until you reach retirement age and beyond.
By the end of the session, you will understand:
  • How the financial markets and the banking system work
  • Why and how major economic factors affect the stock market: Growth/recession, inflation, interest rates & credit, wages & unemployment, government spending, energy & housing markets
  • How crises & asset bubbles affect stocks: The Dot-com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis, and the 2022 market downturn
After you’ve learned the proper fundamentals of stock investing, it’s time to put your knowledge to work! In this session, we’ll discuss how to start putting together the best investment portfolio for you – balancing stocks with other important assets such as bonds or real estate, depending on your personal circumstances. We will also cover basic portfolio strategies, to ensure that we begin building off your fundamental knowledge, and start your journey toward being an even better & more sophisticated investor in the long term!
By the end of the session, you will know how to:
  • Pick sectors & stocks to invest in, using a fundamentals-driven approach
  • Construct a diversified portfolio composed of different stocks and asset classes, with diversified investment characteristics (medium vs. long-term, dividend / value vs. high growth, liquid vs. illiquid, etc.)
  • Execute basic strategies within your portfolio to maximize return while minimizing risk
  • How to think about the different options where to put your money
  • How to minimize the risk of losing money
  • How to maximize the potential returns on your investments
  • How to invest in stocks properly – for the long term, using fundamental analysis
  • How to construct a portfolio composed of different asset classes

The sooner you start investing, the bigger your money can grow.

Learn how to invest properly today with experienced investors.

FAQs

In a nutshell, you’ll learn five things:
  • How to think about the different options where to put your money
  • How to minimize the risk of losing money
  • How to maximize the potential returns on your investments
  • How to invest in stocks properly – for the long term, using fundamental analysis
  • How to construct a portfolio composed of different asset classes
  • We will learn investing the right way.

    We will learn investing in the context of your personal financial goals, looking at different investment options (not just the most talked-about asset classes such as stocks and crypto), using fundamental & long-term analysis for stocks, and taking a well-diversified portfolio approach.

  • We will learn strategic thinking applied to investing.

    We will learn how to evaluate which industries have long-term growth potential, how to think about which stocks to prioritize within an attractive industry, how to minimize risk while maximizing return potential.

  • Our approach will be practical.

    Our goal is for you to know how to, and be comfortable with (a) allocating money for savings & risk protection, (b) evaluating & investing in different cash and debt instruments that can give you a small but safe & steady income stream, (c) opening up a stock brokerage account & buying funds/stocks in an analytical way, and (d) taking small but smart speculative investing risks depending on your goals & risk appetite.

  • For those who still consider themselves in the early stages of their investing journey.

    Maybe you’ve been investing, but not necessarily in a fundamentally sound way. This course can give you the solid foundations you need, and potentially correct bad advice you’ve received before.

  • For those with no experience in investing.

    Maybe you’ve been thinking about investing for a while, but haven’t gotten comfortable enough with the idea, both mentally & emotionally. This course can give you the knowledge & confidence to get started.

  • Whether you have investable capital or not – learning now will benefit you in the future.

    If you have money to invest now, this course can help you allocate it according to your goals & preferences. But even if you don’t, this course can help you understand what you should work towards, and how to invest as soon as you’re financially ready.

  • Personal budgeting & spending.

    There are already so many great financial advisors out there on this topic whose content you can get for free. Our precious time together will be best spent on the highest-value topics – therefore the focus will be on investing. But we will cover personal finance briefly, since it’s critical that we discuss investing in the context of your personal financial situations & goals.

  • Short-term trading.

    We (the instructors who put together this curriculum) believe in the adage that it’s not about “timing the market, but time in the market.” Our course is unlikely to help you if your goal is to make money in less than 1-2 years at least.

  • Technical analysis.

    Simply put, we do not believe that it has any educational value.

  • Philippine stocks (we will only touch on it briefly).

    The stocks portion of this course will focus instead on US stocks, which is easy to invest in these days! We believe that Philippine stocks (a) do not sufficiently trade on fundamentals; (b) operate in a market with insufficient (if not outright opaque) information that is available unevenly to market participants, which is bad for individual investors like you & me; and (c) are an inferior investment option to US stocks based on sheer growth potential. We hope things can change in the future, but this is our view today.

  • Individual stock-picking.

    As with any Accel course – our focus is on teaching you HOW to think, not WHAT to think. This applies most of all in our investing courses. Moreover, we are legally restricted from giving any investment advice. All content in this course is for educational purposes only. While your instructor/s may disclose the positions they hold in individual stocks, this information will be shared as a disclosure or for educational purposes, and not as financial or investment advice.

  • Short-selling.

    This is a risky strategy with unlimited downside risk. We believe this should only be done by institutional investors, or very experienced individual investors with a high risk tolerance.

  • Options, derivatives, trading on margin.

    These are other easy ways to lose lots of money. Options & derivatives are complex financial instruments that are for sophisticated investors only. You don’t need these to make money in investing. We also do not recommend borrowing money to invest in the stock market or in any other high-risk assets.