Smart Investing for Beginners — by Nathan Zhou, former elite hedge fund manager, Caltech & Columbia MBA
Most investors waste years chasing tips, following the crowd, or relying on surface-level analysis. This course will teach you to think and act like the world’s best hedge fund managers — and build a repeatable process for finding undervalued companies with 2–10x potential.
What you’ll learn
- How to effectively invest in ETFs using principles from David Swensen, the legendary Yale Endowment Fund manager.
- How to apply the core principles used by top investors through successful real-world examples from actual hedge fund experience.
- How to use Generative AI to identify and analyze high-return, low-risk investment opportunities with greater speed and confidence.
- How to write effective prompts to analyze successful real-life investment examples using Generative AI.
Course Content
- Introduction –> 4 lectures • 12min.
- Why SPY Outperforms in the Long Run –> 4 lectures • 25min.
- Low-Risk, High-Return Value Investing: Monster Energy Case Study –> 10 lectures • 50min.
- Low-Risk, High-Return Value Investing: Meta Case Study –> 12 lectures • 1hr 2min.
- Bonus Lectures –> 1 lecture • 1min.
Requirements
Most investors waste years chasing tips, following the crowd, or relying on surface-level analysis. This course will teach you to think and act like the world’s best hedge fund managers — and build a repeatable process for finding undervalued companies with 2–10x potential.
Drawing on my experience as a former top-tier hedge fund manager and graduate of Caltech and Columbia Business School, I’ll share the same frameworks used by elite funds such as Tiger Management and the Tiger Cubs to identify durable competitive advantages, calculate intrinsic value, and make high-conviction decisions.
By the end of this course, you won’t just know what to buy — you’ll understand why, and you’ll have the conviction to hold your winners through market noise.
You’ll walk away with:
- A hedge-fund–level process for analyzing companies in hours instead of weeks — powered by generative AI for efficiency.
- The ability to identify moats like brand power, network effects, and economies of scale.
- Real-world case studies (Monster Energy, Meta, and more) showing how great investors uncovered 10-baggers.
- The confidence to evaluate opportunities independently, without chasing stock tips or headlines.
- A framework for those who prefer not to pick stocks: how to build wealth effectively through dollar-cost averaging into ETFs.
This is not a “stock picks” course. It’s a system for thinking like an elite investor — and applying those principles to your own portfolio for long-term success.