martinI just found these lectures by investor Jim Rogers from when he taught at Columbia Business School. He talks on how investing works, how to find stocks, analysing companies to make gains in the stock market, types of company reports, supply & demand, and looking at company spreadsheets. The students pitch their ideas of stocks to invest and their decisions are questioned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKD3k-oX09g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHDTFPA6P5k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2-mpbNN1Tg
Here is an extraction from Rogers recent book ‘Street Smarts’:
I am going to teach this course as if you were working for me. I am the head of research, the head of investments, at a fund, and you are going to be my analysts. I am going to give you companies to analyze, and I will teach you how to do it.” I told them how I went about analyzing companies. I gave them spreadsheets. I had the chairmen of a couple of large corporations come in, and in each case, I would sit and question the chairman as though I were a portfolio manager, an analyst, visiting him at his office, asking all the same questions I would ask if I were trying to figure out whether to invest in his company. Then I would throw it open to the students to ask questions. The assignment, after that, was to write a page, a single page—I would not accept anything longer, and I would not accept it if it were late—on what the student would do relative to that company’s stock: buy it, sell it, sell it short, or do nothing. After a few weeks of this, I had each student choose an industry to analyze—his or her choice, as long as I approved it. Say you were a student in my class and chose to be an airline analyst. We would have a dialogue in front of everybody else in the class, in which you would tell me what you thought. You would tell me how I could best make money in that industry, whether I should buy Delta, short Southwest, whatever your research told you. Everybody, I think, had three rounds. And that is the way the class worked.