5 HN users recommended this course4 months2020–2023score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Recommended as a free, first-principles finance course for software engineers wanting to learn business and finance.
First session of MIT 15.401 Finance Theory I (Fall 2008) taught by Andrew Lo, giving a course overview and introducing core finance concepts. The course ran during the 2007-08 financial crisis.
Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: [link] . You can view the first lecture here: [this video] . Prof. Lo taught this course at MIT in the Fall of 2008, which you can imagine would be a very interesting time to teach finance. The course is excellent. I think you'll really enjoy it.
"Finance Theory" from Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT). [this video] He used "Principles of Corporate Finance" by Richard Brealey, Stewart Myers, and Franklin Allen as the text book. I bought it from Google Play. For accounting, I use Coursera: [link] [link] [link] There are other courses about finance in Coursera and Youtube but I haven't checked them out. But the ones I listed here are good based on my experience.
Thank you kindly for what looks like a great resource! I've been trying to put myself through YouTube night school on some of this stuff, and MIT OCW has great resources as well at significantly less cost than going to MIT ;) This is a pretty reasonable jumping off point for their corpus of financial engineering stuff: [this video] . I'm fortunate enough to work with a person who actually understands derivatives trades with some sophistication, but that's a happy accident and the more people have access to good online resources the better! Edit: I forgot to mention this book ( [link] ) in the spirit of something more technical than the general-audience one I linked above. I have some nitpicks with it as well, but I've gotten value out of it.
Starting point for MIT financial engineering material
MIT free course on finance from first principles. Answers questions like the difference between price and value. Why do interest rates exist [this video]
Some good ones from Stephen Boyd - helped me really grok the subjects. Signals and Systems: [link] Linear Dynamical Systems: [link] This series on Finance Theory by Andrew Lo unfolded just during the 2007-08 crisis - so that's an added bonus as the lectures refer to ongoing events sometimes. [this video]
Finance Theory lectures given during the 2007-08 crisis
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more