| Want
to work on a Harvard MBA? Capital Markets 101 is an interactive tutorial
designed to teach the fundamentals of financial instruments. It works as
a teaching tool, it works as a refresher, it works as a reference, it works.
Teachers and financial professionals, take note, your students can learn this stuff with this program and you can too! Currently it is in use at the Harvard MBA program and is a site licensed product with a $5000 price tag at entry level. (This review is based on the fully functioning, self-destructing in 30 days evaluation version.) Produced by Zoologic, Inc., it is the first of several great financial and marketing tutorials they are preparing for the higher education market. Their next offering will be risk management. The tutorial comes with no written documentation, none is needed. It is entirely interactive and hyperlinked throughout with definitions, formula explanations, sample problems and exercises. The modular format allows you to go through the program in an orderly step-by-step fashion or just jump to the topic or formula you need. Covering over 200 topics and more than 700 exercises, this program packs one heck of an education in a minimum amount of space with no code wasted on glitz. Even so, there is more than sufficient material and interactive help features to keep up the interest while one works through the program and learns the material, using interactive graphics, equations, text and one of the best interactive financial calculators I've run across. Herein lies pure substance, a welcome relief in the fat-code, space wasting, Windows era. Covered topics include fundamentals, cash securities, Foreign exchange, Futures, swaps and options. Minimum systems will operate this program, requiring only 10.5 MB space, 8 MB RAM and any flavor of Windows, from a 486 on up. Fundamentals covers such things as the time value of money and yields. The options section is comprehensive enough to provide any investor, financial analyst, banker or corporate finance officer a usable and working understanding of concepts, tools and analysis. In fact, that statement applies to every topic covered. If you're a broker, CFO, banker or Senior Executive, take note, your firm needs this. If you are a finance student, turn your department head onto this program. Believe me, it will shorten your learning curve to have this available in the campus learning lab. I hated finance in college. The pace was too fast, the coverage too superficial and my instructor so boring he couldn't make the Second Coming interesting. Capital Markets 101 has overcome all of these shortcomings. What do I like about this program?, virtually everything. It teaches in a way I can easily understand, gives me instant reference to the terms formulas and sample equations and exercises. It checks my work, shows me the work and lets me use my own values in every lesson. I can go back over any section at any time and work at my own pace. What's not to like? I can't buy it. I can't get it. I want it. Zoologic is missing out on a market here. I understand their marketing concept. I appreciate their marketing concept. It is a program for the big boys. However, it seems a great sin to wet one's appetite with a program such as this. Individual investors are getting more sophisticated, markets become more complex and volatile daily. This is a tool that can help balance the scales. UTSA, SWB, USAA, every bank and broker, are you listening? Get this. You'll thank me for it and your customers will thank you. You can get an interactive demo at http://www.zoologic.com. While you're doing that, I'll be spending the rest of my thirty days neglecting the net and everything else working to learn as much as I can out of this puppy. For more information on Capital Markets 101 contact:
104 Fifth Avenue 18th Floor New York, NY 10011 1.800.482.2643 |