Teaching-With-ThisEasy

6 min read · 1 089 words

If you are teaching this

Somebody has to turn 129 instruments, 70 transaction types and 142 calculators into twelve weeks with a reading list and an assessment at the end. This page is that arrangement — nothing new, everything already here, put in an order a course can actually use.

What this site can be, in a course

• A set reading. Every page is free, needs no account, works on a phone, and states what it assumes before the reader commits — Easy, Medium or Hard on every link. A student who is behind can start one level lower without asking for permission or being seen to.
• A problem set. The 142 calculators are the exercises. Each one is checked before it ships against a separately written reference, so an answer a student produces here and an answer produced by hand agree.
• A self-test. 275 questions across 40 areas, with explanations, at test your knowledge. Answers stay in the student's own browser and reach nobody — including you, which is a limitation worth knowing about before you plan around it.
• A handout. Eleven printable crib sheets, one per asset class, generated from the same tables the pages use rather than summarised by hand.
• A worked mistake. The 40 case studies are the seminar material: something that broke, why the mechanism allowed it, and what was visible beforehand.

A twelve-week outline that already exists

Each week names pages that are on the site now. Nothing below has to be written, and the order is chosen so that no page assumes something a previous week has not covered.

1. What an instrument is. A share, a bond, a derivative. Then what the wrapper changes, which is the idea the rest of the course keeps needing.
2. How a price gets set. Market microstructure and what happens when you press buy, with the other side of the trade as the seminar reading.
3. Time and money. NPV and IRR and compound interest. The IRR solver is the problem set.
4. Rates and curves. The yield curve, then reference rates — the second explains what the first is built out of.
5. Credit. The credit shelf, spread measures, what a rating tells you.
6. Optionality. An option in plain words, then volatility, then the strategy builder as a live demonstration.
7. Risk, measured. Risk measures and diversification; model risk as the counterweight, so that the measures are not left looking like facts.
8. Leverage and collateral. Leverage, margin and collateral, and Archegos in 2021 as the seminar.
9. Liquidity. Liquidity and Woodford in 2019; how a fund is built for the structure underneath both.
10. Institutions. Bank capital, monetary policy, SVB in 2023 — with how a position hits the books, which is the part that makes the case study make sense.
11. Transactions. The investment banking half: an IPO, an LBO, and what kills a deal.
12. Conduct and the rules. Market abuse, regulation and investor protection, stress testing.

Ten shorter routes already exist as learning paths, each ordered on the same principle. If twelve weeks is the wrong shape, those are the smaller unit.

Assessment, without asking students to hand anything over

Nothing here reports on a named person, by design — the learning record lives in the reader's own browser and is never sent anywhere. That rules out one kind of assessment and leaves several others:

• Set a calculator and ask for the working. The tool gives the answer; the marks are in the derivation and in what the student says about the assumptions the calculator's own notice names.
• Set the four-sentence exercise. Explain it out loud deals an instrument at random and shows afterwards what a complete answer contains. It grades nothing, which makes it a good oral assessment and a poor automated one.
• Set a case study as a written mechanism question. Not "what happened" — the page says what happened — but "which of the six failure patterns in how products fail is this, and what was observable beforehand".
• Set a comparison. Any two instruments side by side produces the facts; the exercise is the paragraph explaining why the differences exist.

What may be reused, and what to ask about

Everything on this site is original to it, which is why this question has a clean answer rather than a hedged one. Three things need no permission and are what the site is for:

• Linking to it, from a reading list, a slide, a virtual learning environment, anywhere.
• Setting pages as reading. There is no paywall, no registration and no limit on how many students open a page.
• Printing the crib sheets and handing them out. They carry the standing notice on the page, which is the condition rather than a formality.

Anything that involves copying substantial text into your own material — a course pack, a slide deck reproducing a page, a book — is a licensing question rather than a technical one, and it is the operator's to answer. Ask, using the address on the legal notice. The answer is likely to be straightforward; what would not be honest is a page on the site inventing a licence grant on the operator's behalf.

Two things to tell a class before they start

• Nothing here is advice, and the site says so on every page. That is not a disclaimer to skip past in week one — it is a distinction worth teaching directly, because the line between explaining a mechanism and recommending an action is one a student will have to hold for the rest of their working life. See the disclaimer.
• Numbers here are conventions, formulas and dated events, never live market sizes. A student who wants to quote how large a market is has to go and source it themselves, with a date attached. That constraint is deliberate and it is also a teachable habit — getting it right in writing makes the argument.

What a seat adds, if a department is buying

Everything above is free and stays free. Team seats exist for the parts that are not about access at all — a reading list you set, the printable packs as one document, and an invoice with a purchase order on it, which is usually the actual obstacle. A seat does not add material, and it deliberately does not add progress reporting on named students; Pro says what it does add.