An MIT professor opened his first lecture by auctioning off a sealed box to twenty-two-year-olds who had zero information about what was inside.

No touching it. No shaking it. No hints. Just a box.

The bidding started at $1. It closed at $45.

He ripped it open. An iPod Nano, retail value $149. The class had priced an unknown object, sight unseen, at roughly a third of its real worth — in about ninety seconds, with nothing but each other's bids to go on.

That's minute twenty of session one of 15.401, Finance Theory, taught by Andrew Lo at MIT Sloan. Free. On YouTube. Since 2008.

Before the auction, Lo puts up three names on the board: James Simons, a math professor who built the most successful hedge fund in history. Warren Buffett, who runs his empire with a tiny staff and literal high-school arithmetic. Jack Welch, an engineer by training who quadrupled GE's revenue without touching a single equation from his own PhD.

Three totally different backgrounds. One shared trait — they all speak the language of finance instinctively.

Then Lo tells the room something most finance bootcamps charge $3,000 a weekend to imply and never actually prove: finance isn't really about complex math. It's about two problems only — valuing things, and deciding what to do once you know the value. Everything else, thirteen weeks of it, is commentary.

There are no problem sets in this course. He hands you the entire exam question bank on day one and tells you the majority of exam points come straight from it. He says it flat out: memorize the whole stack and you'll pass — except by then you'll have accidentally learned finance.

The full thirteen weeks are still sitting on MIT OpenCourseWare, untouched by most people who bookmark it.

The lecture is free. Bidding on the box after everyone else already has is the entire course in miniature.