It's true that there time pressure under these Master programmes. Basically if you are new to the subjects you don't even have the time to read everything. By the way I think this is the difference between a master and a PhD. During a master you learn a lot of different things without having the time to deeply understand them. But this is usually what you need when you will have to solve a problem in a job position without a PhD, I guess.In my experience the master courses required by these programme are designed to teach you these subjects, so you don't have to know these subjects before. The point is that if you already have a good knowledge of these subjects you can take as electives advanced PhD courses.By the way if you have a solid basic knowledge (calculus, statistic and probability,some programming knowledge and a bit of finance) I'll suggest you to go for the master.