Fast track, and what you can skip

Fourteen modules, eleven weeks, two papers

The syllabus has eleven topics; this course has fourteen modules, because the Excel spine (time value of money) is split in two and this opening module and the closing experiment module are added at either end. The figure below lays each module against its syllabus week, the paper it feeds and the register it drills.

Modules 1–8 are the midterm's material: this module, the market's purpose, the Canadian industry, the capital market, regulation, the two TVM modules, and economics and policy. Modules 9–14 are the final's calculation-weighted half: fixed-income features, bond pricing, equities, derivatives, risk and efficiency, and the 12-vs-12 experiment with its rehearsal.

Three routes

You have done the CSC. Skim Modules 2–5 and 8 — the institutions, the capital market, regulation, and economics and policy are the CSC's chapters 1–5 and you already hold the vocabulary. Do the MCQ in each anyway: the distractor sets are built from the Canadian names that have changed since older CSC material was written (CIRO for IIROC and the MFDA; Cboe Canada for NEO; T+1 for T+2). Then work every numeric in Modules 6–7 and 9–13 in full. The Excel part is where a CSC holder loses marks, because the CSC does not examine it.

You have no finance background. Everything in order. The modules are sequenced so that no institution is named before you can say what it is for, and no instrument is priced before the Excel spine is complete.

You are Excel-fluent already. Sit the checkpoints of Modules 6 and 7 first. If you pass both cold, back-fill the memorisation modules and go straight to bonds. If you fail either, the failure is almost always one of the four conventions below, not the arithmetic.

The four conventions, recited

Whatever route you take, these are the four things the calculation part marks silently, and this module has now taught all of them:

1. Sign. Excel returns the cash flow that balances the ones you entered. Enter outflows negative; read the answer as money back to you.
2. Argument order. PV, FV, PMT, NPER share (rate, nper, pmt, pv or fv, type); RATE moves nper to the front.
3. Rate per period, periods in total. Divide the annual rate by $p$ and multiply the years by $p$ — twice or not at all — and keep any payment in the same period.
4. Time zero. NPV starts at the end of period 1, so the outlay goes outside: =NPV(rate, CF1:CFn) + CF0. IRR starts at time 0: =IRR(CF0:CFn).

Worked example — a route decision

Amara holds the CSC, uses Excel daily, and has three weeks before the midterm. She skims Modules 2–5 in two evenings, doing only the MCQs, and misses four — all on names that changed after 2023. She then sits the Module 6 checkpoint cold and fails on a monthly-compounding question: she divided the rate by 12 but typed the years in years. That single result tells her where the three weeks go: every numeric in Modules 6 and 7, twice, with the cell-reference form of each formula. The route is chosen by evidence, not by confidence.