The people behind investment education
We started with a question that wouldn't leave us alone: why do so many people approach markets without a real framework for understanding what they're actually looking at?
How we think about teaching investment research
Research before opinion
Every course starts with primary documents: actual financial statements, regulatory filings, industry reports. We don't begin with someone's interpretation of a company. We begin with the numbers that company reported to regulators, and we teach you to read those numbers yourself.
This matters because financial media runs on speed and opinion, while good research runs on verification and patience. Our students learn the difference between a clickable headline and a defensible investment thesis.
The skills we focus on
Financial statement analysis comes first because you can't evaluate a business without understanding its accounting. Then we move into valuation models, not as abstract formulas but as practical tools for comparing what a company is worth versus what it's trading for.
Industry analysis follows because every company exists in a competitive context. We teach pattern recognition across sectors, how to spot when an entire industry is mispricing risk, and when individual companies are breaking from their peer group for legitimate reasons.
Silas Duncombe
Lead Research Instructor
Spent eleven years as a sell-side analyst before realizing most institutional research was answering the wrong questions. Now teaches students to ask better ones, starting with "what does this company actually do" instead of "where is the stock going."
What students actually work on
You'll build your own research models from scratch, not fill in templates. You'll write investment memos that defend a position with evidence, not gut feeling. You'll present your analysis to people who will ask hard questions about your assumptions.
We grade based on the quality of your reasoning and whether your conclusions follow from your data. We don't grade based on whether your stock pick went up or down, because short-term price movements tell you almost nothing about research quality.
Document-driven
Start with regulatory filings and financial statements, not market commentary
Model-focused
Build valuation frameworks from first principles, not pre-made templates
Thesis-based
Develop defensible arguments supported by verifiable data and clear logic
Our method isn't faster or easier than watching market recap videos. It's slower and more demanding. But it teaches you to analyze businesses the way institutional researchers do, with the same tools, same standards, and same expectation that your work needs to hold up under scrutiny.