Great idea for a specialization and bravo to the professor for capitalizing on her affiliation with a top-tier research university while working there as a visiting professor. Unfortunately the course is riddled with errors in the very first week which is problematic for at least two reasons: 1) it may be reinforcing learning that is factually inaccurate, and 2) it adds unnecessary time and frustration to the process.

I have taken several excellent courses from Coursera that are well-designed, and while most courses can be forgiven for having a few have small errors, this is the first time I have noticed multiple errors--and a few major obvious errors--immediately in one course. After hardly an hour of working with this course I canceled the subscription and am requesting a refund for the first month's payment. I hope the creators of this course clean up the errors and inconsistencies or take the course offline.

no formulae's are explained properly

One week in and the difficulty of the questions for the practice quiz's and tests is very significant compared to what was covered in the videos. The videos are very cut and try with basic examples and often skip over working through the problems. If I didn't have a finance background from University already, this course would be incredibly difficult.

I will fail because, despite submitting my assignment on time, they were not graded by my peers on time. Please notice that I took excellent grade on all quizzes and assignments. The entire peer grading system is a fraud. Professors and Teaching assistants are supposed to grade assignments, not students. I paid a fee and I deserve my assignments to be graded properly and on time. This is a fraud!

A very basic course, for beginners, but still not enough detail included to bring a beginner to a competent level on the subject areas covered. I had to watch supplemental videos on YouTube to "flesh out" the topics covered. Examples of this included the concept of liquidity, the course video suggested that the Bid, Ask spread indicated the liquidity of an asset class. Supplemental videos showed that one could not rely simply on the Bid, Ask spread, but also the volume of assets traded to determine how liquid a stock was. Another example was the introduction of intermediate options trading strategies for the first time on a quiz. The options profit and loss diagrams and rationale for their use were not covered in the lecture videos. Some of the optional supplemental materials were not available to me or difficult to access for me as I live outside of the United States. References to YouTube videos would have been easier to access. I ended up using YouTube videos covering the same topics instead of the recommended links.

I love the ability to replay parts of the lectures but there is zero support for this program. Also the forum features are very limited so communication and accountability are non existent. I really needed this course too but I can't spend hours and hours trying to figure it all out on my own, too time consuming. I'll have to find another investor course somewhere else.

Good course to waste your money on, poorly designed homework, very superficial description of the topics, (especially the 2nd week materials).

Don't take the specialization. Quizzes are incorrect and won't let you progress!

Useful course but of poor quality. Content is badly organized (students are often presented with concepts not yet introduced.) The lecturer tends to not give precise definitions of important concepts and sometimes misuses terminology (for example, use "return" to refers to "return on investment" at one place and to "internal rate of return" at another.)

The course content is a bit low on examples, making connections and explaining the 'why' - it is very to the point in therms of presenting concepts - but the professor is clear, concise and just the right difficulty.

Good and succinct introduction to financial markets and instruments. Clear valuation formulas and intuitive explanation of treatment of cash-flows to define future and present values.

I'm a Rice University graduate and this course is just terrible. It is sloppily contrived and the forum is completely ignored by the instructor. This is a complete waste of my time.

Really good and exigent course.

The supposed time needed to complete the course is not correct. You will get to "invest" much more, but my advise is that, while hard, it deserves what it takes.

Good overall course to go over present/future value, rates of return, stocks, bonds, alternative investments, etc. More math than i was expecting. Good course.

I think its a good introduction to financial markets but more from an academics perspective. We hardly had any guidance or reference to contemporary real markets. I wanted to learn about investment and I only learn how to calculate basic yields and returns. I turn on Bloomberg TV today and still do not understand any of the numbers and nomenclature they show or make reference to....

In conclusion I think the course is good from an academic standpoint but not for real life interaction with finance markets and news.

Not so well structured. Some details are mentioned wrongly (in the lecture and the quiz) so I had a hard time with the calculations. Overall knowledge is good and helpful.

Pretty basic. Needed external sources to supplement study. The course has quite short videos and could be a lot more informative.

Honestly, there is a lot wrong with this course. The professors glass over a host of very important explanations that are needed to understand the basics of the formulas they are trying to teach. A lot of the time they will fill the formula in and just say "so when you solve for that" which leaves a lot of people at a loss for how to actually solve the formula. The tests are poorly worded and put together, many times the questions will say "state your answer as a percentage rate" and when stated as a percentage rate the answer is wrong because "what you submitted is not a number". I am a person with very little financial background looking to expand my financial knowledge and I have struggled to persist with this course because time and time again a basic formula is taught in the lessons and on the test other more complicated formulae are needed to obtain the right answer.

In summary, the tests are poorly worded and often include material more advanced than what is being taught in the lessons themselves, the professors don't seem like they know what they are talking about, merely reading off of an auto-cue telling them what to say. The professors skip a lot of material needed to understand what they are talking about and what is being asked on the exams. In order to complete this course you will need to spend a lot more time utilizing resources from other parts of the internet to gain an understanding about the financial instruments and how to calculate them.

DO NOT SPEND MONEY ON THIS COURSE. I ended up paying for the course only because I have A LOT of time on my hands and did not manage to cancel my subscription before the free trial ended. From such a prestigious university such a Rice it is disappointing to see the amount of half-assed effort gone into this course.

At the end of the day, this course will give you a better understanding of the financial world than you had previously and if you stick with it, it is quite educational. However be prepared to do a lot of figuring sh*t out yourself.

They are way too many mistakes in this course, some of them still haven't been corrected 6 years after the initial launch of the class. The material is starting to be really outdated with articles dating back to 2015 / 2016. Some of the material in some of the quizzes isn't covered in the lessons or in one case, is covered in the following week lessons. I don't understand how this course is still on Coursera. This is by far the worst course I have taken on this platform and seeing its quality made me look at other platforms such as EdX. Also the course's forum is inundated with spam. I've notified Coursera but they clearly failed to fix the problem.