A few days ago, my colleague Gus Farrow told me about Hamish’s nice story. Hamish is a student of the Financial Trading Analysis (FTA) short course that we developed together with University of Essex online. Here is his experience.
Hamish was part of our very first cohort on the FTA. Despite having never worked in the financial sector, growing up in New Zealand, a commodity driven economy, instigated his interest in markets and understanding supply and demand.
Having moved to the UK some thirty years ago, Hamish has a varied career in engineering, hospitality, education and now healthcare where he works as a specialist oxygen technician for the NHS.. It was upon travelling through Spain a few years ago that he rekindled his interest in markets upon noticing the correlation between anguish of the people he spoke to, and the distressed financial conditions.
While Hamish stepped into the FTA without a formal education or background in finance, he did so with a critically important intellectual curiosity that saw him consumed by the content. His embracing of the different ideas and aspects of the course outside of his previous exposure saw him discover quite a talent for the portfolio management side of things.
Commenting on his experience, Hamish writes:
“ The FTA course at Essex Uni initially presented itself as an overwhelming challenge with a large element of self doubt given I had no financial background. However I was determined to beat all the odds and persevered with study, and material which was made very accessible by the course itself, along with the attentive support of the team who always made themselves available.”
“Due to the structure of the course via presentation slides, I paid particular attention to noting down as much information as possible then referring back to the written notes during and after work. This I found kept my discipline with what the course actually required in terms of blogs, journals and assignment submissions.“
“Assistance through Kaplan open learning, Harvard referencing and the online libraries gave scholarly support. I also went outside the course material, going to seminars, buying the Financial Times every weekend as well as other related publications and checking morning news feeds from FXStreet.com as a guide to any major impact news releases – along with interaction with fellow students.”
More information about the Financial Trading Analysis Course