A free, structured curriculum that teaches financial principles through international examples — from Tokyo savings to Lagos microloans, from German pensions to Brazilian bonds. Built for self-study; designed for understanding.
Each track covers one domain of financial life or practice. The two complete tracks (Foundations and Corporate Finance) appear first. The remaining sixteen are sketched here as a roadmap for what's coming — pick the one closest to what you'd most like to learn next.
Bond pricing, duration and convexity, credit spreads, the yield curve, and the mechanics of the world's largest securities market. From sovereign Treasuries to leveraged loans.
Forwards, futures, options, and swaps — what they are, how they're priced, and why every modern financial system depends on them. Black-Scholes, hedging, and structured products.
How sell-side and buy-side analysts build company models, write reports, and form views. Industry analysis, channel checks, earnings models, and the craft of investment recommendations.
Reading a firm as a creditor rather than an equity holder. Cash flow coverage, covenants, credit ratings, default prediction, and the discipline of asking what could go wrong.
How money is created, how banks operate, what central banks do, and why monetary policy works the way it does. The plumbing of the modern financial system.
Market microstructure, order types, liquidity, market-making, high-frequency trading, and the empirical evidence on what works (and what doesn't) in active trading.
Financing early-stage companies. Term sheets, valuation methodologies for unprofitable firms, portfolio math, the power law, and how VC differs from public-markets investing.
Distressed debt, merger arbitrage, spinoffs, restructurings, and other corporate events. How specialists make money on situations that don't fit standard valuation frameworks.
The economics of pooling risk. Underwriting, reserves, reinsurance, and the unique financial structure of insurance companies — why they look so different from banks on a balance sheet.
How credit reaches households. Credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student loans, BNPL, and payday lending — the economics, regulation, and welfare effects of consumer credit markets.
The rails of modern commerce. Card networks, ACH, real-time payments, cross-border remittances, and the rise of stablecoins as payment infrastructure.
Neobanks, banking-as-a-service, open banking APIs, and how digital-native financial firms have reshaped what a bank looks like. The case studies and the business models.
Decentralized finance built on public blockchains. Automated market makers, lending protocols, stablecoins, and a clear-eyed look at what crypto does and doesn't replicate from traditional finance.
Fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest, fairness, and the recurring ethical problems of finance — front-running, mis-selling, market manipulation, fraud. The CFA-style framework plus real cases.
ESG investing, climate finance, impact measurement, and the honest empirical debate about whether and when sustainability and returns align. Standards, disclosures, and greenwashing.
The actual jobs in finance — what bankers, traders, analysts, PMs, regulators, and treasurers really do. How to get in, how to choose between paths, and what each role costs and offers.
In personal finance, you are both the decision-maker and the person affected by the decision. That clean alignment of interests makes it the right place to begin — before we get to corporate finance, where the two roles split apart.
Knowing where you stand. Income, expenses, fixed vs. variable costs, the personal balance sheet, and how households around the world structure their money.
The two directions of money. Savings instruments and credit instruments, with the costs and constraints of each. The price of moving money through time.
Future value, present value, compounding, and the Rule of 72 — illustrated through Tokyo, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Lagos, and beyond. Includes a free Excel toolkit.
Why headline interest rates lie. Nominal vs. real returns, currency stability, and what the Argentine peso teaches everyone else.
Why some assets pay more than others. Risk premiums, volatility, diversification, and the link between risk and the discount rate.
The capstone. Using NPV, IRR, and payback period to decide whether a project, an investment, or any major financial decision is actually worth doing — at the right risk-adjusted discount rate.
When the decision-maker isn't the affected party. Capital structure, financial statements, valuation, M&A, bankruptcy, and the agency problem that makes corporate finance fundamentally different from personal finance. Module 01 is published; the rest are in development.
Why corporate finance is a separate subject. The role of the CFO, the principal-agent problem, fiduciary duties (care, loyalty, good faith), and the four governance mechanisms — compared across six countries.
A firm is a pool of assets producing cash flows. Those flows are paid out in a strict order of priority. Senior debt, subordinated debt, preferred equity, common equity — and the security types that compose the modern capital stack.
The three statements (income, balance sheet, cash flow) and how they connect. Accrual vs. cash accounting. Working capital, quality of earnings, and the analyst adjustments that matter. IFRS vs. US GAAP differences worth knowing.
The workhorse skill of corporate finance. Project revenues from drivers; tie through to integrated income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Free cash flow to firm vs. equity. Includes a free Excel toolkit.
Where the discount rate comes from in practice. Cost of equity (CAPM, dividend discount), cost of debt, and the weighted average. Why WACC estimates vary across analysts even for the same firm.
Comparable company analysis and precedent transaction analysis. EV/EBITDA, P/E, EV/Revenue, and choosing the right multiple. The trap that "multiples are easy" — they aren't.
Cash flows from Module 04 meet the discount rate from Module 05. Build the DCF: explicit projection, terminal value, enterprise vs. equity value. Sensitivity to terminal growth and WACC — the two assumptions that swing everything.
What happens when the firm can't pay. Liquidation vs. reorganization. Chapter 7 vs. 11 vs. 15 (US); UK administration; Brazilian recuperação judicial; Japanese civil rehabilitation; the German Insolvenzordnung.
Why companies merge and why most M&A destroys value. Strategic vs. financial buyers, synergies (real and imagined), deal structure, premium analysis, regulatory landscape across jurisdictions.
The decision modules. How much debt should a firm carry (M-M, trade-off, pecking order). What to do with surplus cash — dividends vs. buybacks. International variation. Includes a closing capstone exercise.
Most finance education comes from one of two unhappy places: textbook abstraction that never touches a real wallet, or American-centric advice that breaks the moment you cross a border. Globefin's central commitment is the alternative: finance taught comparatively, with the world built in from the start rather than added as a footnote.
Inflation isn't explained only with US consumer prices — it's explained with hyperinflation history in Brazil, with deflation in Japan, with eurozone harmonized indices. Pensions aren't explained only with 401(k)s — they're explained alongside Germany's pay-as-you-go system, France's PER, and the absence of formal pensions in most emerging economies. Every module pairs the universal principle with at least two specific national instances.
The point isn't tourism. It's that comparison is how you learn which features of a system are universal (the time value of money applies everywhere) and which are local choices that could have been made differently (shareholder primacy vs codetermination; debtor-in-possession vs administrator-led bankruptcy). Students who learn finance in only one country mistake their country's conventions for laws of nature.
The graduates of this approach are useful in cross-border settings — which is where most senior finance careers eventually land — and recognize the design choices that built their home system, instead of taking them for granted.
Module 01 takes about 25 minutes. By the end, you will have built your own cash-flow statement and balance sheet — in any currency.
Start Module 01 →