Gadgets & Gizmos

FourQuants and FinanceTrainingCourse, based out of Karachi, are ventures led by Jawwad Farid, which aim to teach finance to people through internet (videos) and mobile apps.
FinanceTrainingCourse is a partially free portal while FourQuants caters to enterprise customers through subscriptions.
One may call this FinanceTrainingCourse inspired by Khan Academy, however, both FinanceTrainingCourse and FourQuants takes next level route to teach and train professionals of a narrowed niche i.e. finance, with premium content for which they charge as well.
The portals themselves are designed for anyone interested in finance, students and professionals alike. The team behind the ventures has taken an easy approach to the material which has helped them gather and serve customers from 162 countries and over 5,000 cities over the world.
Free material is available and paid courses are also there. Some of the paid materials include things like downloadable pdf guides, sample excel model templates and subscriptions to their high end enterprise learning portal dedicated to risk, pricing and treasury management.
Recently they released iPhone, iPad and Android apps under the FourQuants name. The app allows customers to download and view free sample videos related to the field of computational finance, capital adequacy and risk management. The videos are aimed at practitioners, bankers and regulators. The application allows one to access 6 full length video lectures and another forty 2 – 5 minute samplers through the FourQuants YouTube channel.
The application also allows you to purchase video, pdf and excel content on various topics such as pricing, valuation, interest rate modeling and risk management. Topics in the free samples include:

• Financial Modeling – Complete Lesson
• Pitching for Start-ups – Complete Series
• Asset Liability Management – Short
• Selling Treasury Products – Short
• Stress Testing – Short
• Option Pricing – Short
• Quant Crash Course – Short
• Setting Limits – Short

In Jawwad’s own words, “Ultimately people need help in building models, validating models and explaining models to people who don’t come from a financial modeling background. We have been doing just that for the last 10 years as part of our risk practice. While we do very well with our site, the smart phone and tablet market was the next big thing. It was right there in front of us and we took it.”
The iPhone, iPad and Android apps were built by Pepper.pk, the award winning mobile application studio run by Five Rivers Technology in Lahore.
The links to the apps as well as both the websites are given below:

• iPhone app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourquants./id497901651?mt=8
• Android app: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.frt.fourquants
• FourQuants: http://fourquants.com/
• FinanceTrainingVideos: http://financetrainingcourse.com/