Howdy all,I'm a long-time lurker starting a fixed-term postdoc soon. My exit from academia is on the horizon and finance is a field I want to explore now. I applied to 3 or 4 quant jobs after my defense but I was not prepared. I've allotted time for one online course; two that start in Jan/Feb caught my attention:https://www.edx.org/course/pricing-opti ... pricingAny thoughts on which of these might be better? Or is there another course you'd recommend? (The constraints of a "class"---deadlines and such---motivate me, so the EdX/Coursera format is best.)

Better for what? Getting into finance? What kind of finance do you want to be in? The courses you mention are so different that if you have a basic idea what finance is about, you should be able to tell the difference between the type of content between the two and know which one interests you.

Thanks for your response. Better in terms of quality (mostly). I've taken 2 non-finance courses; 1 was terrible, 1 was good. I just need a place to start, so I'll still enjoy a high-quality course on a topic I won't pursue professionally. I don't know the answer to your remaining questions---what's "basic" in your mind? My eyes glaze over when I read the jargon here.I understand that the applications are different---the EdX one is derivatives, the Coursera one seems more general---but how different are the underlying principles?

If none of the terms mean anything to you, you're probably better off doing the "asset pricing" course. Personally, I find the topic a bit boring and not very useful, it will/should provide you with a much broader overview of a lot of different things that are being done in finance (especially if you also do part 2 of the course). The mathematical models course might be more interesting in terms of content, but the risk is there that you cannot contextualize it.Disclaimer: haven't done either of the courses, but I've had courses on both topics when I was in university

Cochrane's course is likely to be both easier to follow and more broadly applicable. His text book on asset pricing is the standard, and even his research papers are generally fairly accessible, without in any way being "easy" (he is a recent past president of the American Finance Association, and very high in the macro finance/asset pricing pecking order these days). I have only seen research papers and presentations from Cvitanic, but his primary background is from very difficult areas of math finance, and his natural habitat is a bit further away from what he is teaching in this course. Of course, as BramJ was implicitly alluding to, if you want to become a derivatives quant then this would be the more useful course. But it sounds like you have a bit more research to do before you can address that decision head on...

Excellent information. Cochrane's course it is. I will do more research; my background and interest are in the more difficult math/statistics, but gotta start somewhere. Thanks!