Bogleheads community, including a wiki https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page and forums https://www.bogleheads.org/

+1. Bogleheads has an amazing community maintained wiki. I would add that their recommended reading list of books is also excellent: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...

+1. Best place for anyone to start - regardless of your background.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Including a Life-Cycle Guide to Personal Investing by Burton Malkiel

Burton Malkiel Wrote "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" In ‘73. Have His Views Changed? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJCEP83QTM

Burton Malkiel | Talks at Google -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnCxlIQjT-s

I think the best way is to learn how to read and understand financials, like a 10-Q, and other basic concepts and then get going on either a real account (with say 5% of what you intend to invest down the line) or paper trading. However a real account will be much more educational because with paper trading/investing you’ll be inclined to ignore losses or make money taking much greater risks than you’d want to make with actual money. Just do a ton of googling, most financial books I read have not been super helpful, if you are only doing stocks there are frankly not a lot of concepts to learn.

Personally I would not recommend “trading” as an amateur at all. If you are investing over months/years that’s one thing, but making money long term over <1 week time spans on stocks is quite hard. I think the appeal of amateur “trading” is that it’s job-like but the reality is that you’re not going to make significant money with a smallish account, retail tools, and no professional experience.

In general I would never advise joining a course or “paid discord” or on stock trading. Those are pretty much all scams. There are some real, formerly successful traders that do these but the one I’m familiar with basically went broke several times because he opened himself up to too much risk (which is why you don’t see a lot of successful traders selling courses, they are too busy making money trading). Some of these courses also sell straight up misinformation like Technical Analysis

Technical Analysis is not misinformation. Research it. A lot of people think so but if you know what you are doing it's way better than fundamental analysis, depending on what you are doing. I.e. doing TA for long-term stock holding is probably not ideal but trading options with TA is definitely profitable.

If you are wanting to learn because you find it interesting or are looking to work in the industry - follow the advice in this thread!

If you are looking to do some personal finance - in general it’s not a good idea to pick your own stocks. You are going against massive analysis teams in Goldman Sachs, and they are probably going to win. Instead look into index funds or similar!

This is sage advice.

Warren Buffet is such a firm believer in this principle that he bet a hedge fund manager $1 million that he couldn't beat the S&P over a decade[0]. Buffet won. The S&P beat the manager by 5% ANNUAL return.

Hedge fund managers pick stocks all day, every day. If these guys with Ivy League finance bona-fides aren't able to consistently beat the S&P, you should really think about whether you'll be able to beat it in your spare time.

[0]https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/306846

> he couldn't beat the S&P

if someone has bought FAANG + MS + TSLA 10 years ago - would s/he beat S&P ?

If someone bought FAANG + MS + TSLA today and compared it to 10 years from now would they beat the S&P?

That's basically the point. It's easy to beat the S&P with knowledge in retrospect.

For an example where betting on tech (tech startups, at least, which is considered a hot sector) hasn't played out, cnsider the Vision Fund.

Vision Fund had no vision fund. Their portfolio companies were useless right off the bat

Easy to say in hindsight, eg companies like WeWork while obviously shit now definitely looked like it would revolutionise an industry at the time.

Vision Fund had vision. Their portfolio companies were useless right off the bat

That's like betting on the Patriots for the 2019 Super Bowl.

It already happened and we know the outcome. Hindsight is 20/20.

Sure, in hindsight. I would argue that all of those stocks had their negatives in 2010 that could easily cause investors to look elsewhere though. The real question is what stocks are you going to buy today to beat the S&P over the next 10 years? It probably won't be that same bundle as in 2010.

yes, but he wouldn't find a lot of clients interested in paying him 2 & 20 for such a simple strategy

Also, just so little companies is very risky. E.g. if Tesla flopped you'd probably underperform

If you want to learn because you are looking to work in the industry, I would recommend checking out Wall Street Oasis [1], a community of current and future finance professionals.

[1]: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/

It depends actually what is your purpose.

If you intend to learn about stock trading for personal finance reasons you can follow a lot of blogs or podcasts in the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) community. Some examples are the stock series of JL Collins (https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/) and the Mad Fientist (https://www.madfientist.com/, the blog is a bit tax focused, but it goes well with the Podcast).

If you want to learn about active trading then you need vastly different resources and not really my expertise.

Just wanted to mention that there are basically two philosophies here and based on either what knowledge you want to gain or how much risk you want to take as an investor you will need to choose what to learn.

Try reading company annual and quarterly reports to help decide if you want to invest in their stock or not. These reports contain a wealth of information including candid management discussions, financial sheets, disclosures and much more. These are long documents that do take time to read but my side project (shameless plug) https://www.Last10K.com aims to help investors read these documents more efficiently.

You can also google study materials for the Securities Industry Essentials (SIE) exam which covers basic securities information that can be applied to investing.

https://www.finra.org/registration-exams-ce/qualification-ex...

I don’t think diving into reports is the right step for someone who’s asking where to start.

You need a lot of context for what you’re seeing in your average quarterly. Perhaps start with reading something like The Intelligent Investor to understand fundamental analysis, then read them.

Of popular intellectual topics, nothing is simpler to explain:

* If you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas.

* If you want to make money, invest in index funds.

Further reading: https://arachnoid.com/equities_myths/

Yes ... it really is that simple.

What do you do if you want to minimize the effects of an upcoming devastating market crash but still retain the value of your retirement (I.e. not cash out and get penalized)?

I like AAII, American Association of Individual Investors. It's a independent, non-profit organization with resources and publications to learn about investing without bias to any particular company or product. https://www.aaii.com/

I see they have on-demand webinars, too. https://www.aaii.com/webinars

Local chapters have meetups with presentations and discussion. Now online, of course. There's a page on their website about local chapters and their activities. Presenters at chapter meetings are supposed to be educational and without a sales pitch. In practice they're 98% educational and may have a slide or a handout on the company they work for. Here's the YouTube page for past presentations from one chapter. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxl8fQH-F4ooXb-U8IO6zQ

Ameritrade has videos on learning about investing, trading, and their platform features, including most basic "this is a stock, this is a bond" type videos. I thought E*Trade had a bunch of similar videos, but I'm not finding them now. Both E-Trade and Charles Schwaub have both live and on-demand webinars. Probably other brokers do also. https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/investing-basics (more textual) https://us.etrade.com/knowledge/events#events_tab2 (on-demand webinars) https://www.tdameritrade.com/education/investment-videos.pag...

Trying to look at it with the eye of a beginner, it seems to get pretty specialized pretty quickly. Hope you can find something in there that fits what you're looking for.

Stock trading and investing, while not mutually exclusive, are not the same thing. Please be aware of the difference before starting to trade.

That said, I don't have a good resource on trading, but when I looked into it many years ago, most of them were either selling a platform/brokerage that promoted frequent trading (hence earning commission fees) or trying to sell information products by "gurus" that somehow decided to teach the ways of trading instead of becoming a trader themselves.

I would actually recommend learning accounting, not 'investing'. Why? Because accounting teaches you to understand how a company reports, which is frankly more important than any get rich quick investing book.

Accounting is incredibly dense, and you will come to appreciate the many ways in which companies can report the same information. You'll also understand what the terms you see thrown around mean, and you'll also see why financial math is not software math.

>When you search for courses on how to learn software development, there are tons of resources, meanwhile when you search for courses on how to stock trade and invest, only investopedia comes up.

I think the problems are similar for both subjects. When you search for software development, where would you even start? What language? Web, mobile, embedded? The software development world is large and there's no good single resource to "learn" it.

Ditto for investing; it might even be a larger subject. If you want to "learn to invest" because you want to save money, your best bet is to use a service that buys ETFs, contribute money monthly and never look at it.

However, if you're interested in investing as an art/science, there's a vast literature. Stocks? Bonds? Private equity? Distressed assets? Real estate? Cryptocurrency? Options, futures or other derivatives? Long or short? Active or passive? Fundamental or technical? On what scale do you plan to hold your investments?

The fact is, there's no right way to start. You have to narrow it down. I see a few recommendations to read financial reports. Sure, maybe. But this isn't 1975; I bet 75% of financial professionals have never read a 10k.

I highly recommend "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by Jack Bogle. It's a super short book full of great advice from the inventor of the Index Fund:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp...

I second this. Forget about trading, stock picking, and other wastes of time (and money).

You will find links to some MOOCs here: https://learnawesome.org/topics/cd05721c-f47f-4351-a637-8d1a...

The one called "Trading Basics" by ISB seems like a good starting point.

I’ve been investing for a long time. Biggest key: open an account, add money, and buy something. You will rapidly learn what works, what doesn’t, what drives price etc.

Reading financial statements is a good exercise and certainly important if you are investing at the institutional level, but you’ll find that price has a lot more to do with supply and demand of investors who want the stock than anything else.

This supply and demand principle in economics is oft lost in investing principle books that try to teach theory of valuation, etc.

Assuming you are into tech, since you’re here, you will find that tech stocks will barely reflect what an investing value book would teach. Possibly even teach valuations that are off by orders of magnitude due to the money being thrown at tech growth stocks.

Price doesn’t equal valuation until you are trying to sell.

If you are still looking for books, Margin of Safety is good. Intelligent Investor (though very outdated) is good. Jack Bogle stuff is good . Read annual LP memos from hedge funds and institutions like endowments and pension funds. They are throwing around big money and it’s fun to see what they think about.

Some good memos - Baupost Group, Berkshire Hathaway, Howard Marks. Email me if you want any more info.

MIT OCW has videos of their Finance Theory class online, and it's fantastic. The professor, Andrew Lo, is a great lecturer, and explains everything really well. Doesn't cover everything you're looking for, but it'd be hard to beat as a general introduction to the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOs...

Not only is it interesting in its own right, but it was coincidentally recorded as the 2008/2009 financial crises was unfolding, and many of the lectures open with a few minutes of discussion about what was going on in the economy at the time. Neat to hear an econ PhD give a play-by-play on an economic meltdown.

Is there something like this but fast forwarded to now?

I also noticed this was from 2007/8, just as the financial crisis was getting started. I'm looking forward to watching this series and then finding some sort of update for the last decade or so. To the extent that finance professionals and investors would have taken courses like this one and learned things like this, it will be useful to have a similar foundation.

https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePlainBagel/ - Not really a course, but this guy gives really good advice on stock trading and investing without all the bullshit

https://www.twitch.tv/thestockguy - I can personally recommend this channel for your daily dose of stock related entertainment. It's not a yolo on options channel, it's just a guy that wants to see other people grow their hard earned money into something meaningful.

The discord associated with this twitch channel has an amazing help section, search and you'll find some remarkably well written answers. Just avoid the degenerate-chat topic though.

Via the The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz "Retired and want to try day trading? Read this first: the overwhelming pattern is for them to eventually lose much of their winnings." Marketwatch https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retired-and-want-to-try-da...

For fundamentals, this resource by Varsity (kind of like Robinhood of India) is pretty good. It uses India's stocks as examples and deals in Rupees and not in Dollars.

After learning the basics, I would recommend "The 80/20 Investor" book. The book has very good advice how to buy stocks, market bubbles and building the circle of competence.

QuantInsti offers a course that is really in-depth. It’s like 4 months. All video based with live instructors, practice and tests. It’s worth the money IMHO.

Ernest Chan has written several books. He also offers live courses. He is one cool dude.

Learning to read candlestick charts and recognize patterns.

Backtesting your strategies is crucial.

Try to use data sources that haven’t introduced survivorship bias.

Just added a few of the resources posted on this thread [1].

The page is hosted by us but the resources are not connected to us.

[1] https://marketgodfathers.com/best-resources-to-learn-about-s...

https://www.internalpointers.com/category/finance is a good resource to grok the basics and if you are feeling lucky after you can bash out some C++ as well from the main url.

I'd recommend Khan Academy - the videos there are always succinct and clear, and it's free, an incredible resource imo.

Introduction to Financial Accounting on Coursera is also great, will help to understand business valuation, read a balance sheet, etc.

The Plain Bagel on Youtube is a good investment channel, no bs.

Although you do not want to read, I recommend a book 'Warren Buffett's Three Favorite Books' by Preston Pysh. It is written in an easy to digest style. He has videos to explain every chapter. He boils down a lot of the Buffett theory on successful investing.

I like "Unconventional Success" by David Swensen, who was Yale's endowment manager for a while (and his apprentices now run several Ivy endowments). Very Bogle-esque

Kevin O'Leary from shark tank has a good deal of online advice about investing and budgeting in his YT channel.

The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.

The telegram group at vectorspace.ai

How do I join this group?

Movie Wall Street with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas.

Start with it after November.

If you think you can miss eg. 5k. Only buy 2.5 k. In stock, the rest is spare money for drops.

Only buy the ones that you have a good guess for ( happens once in a year).

If you get to 20 k. Congratulations. Now change tactics. Buy stocks that are undervalued and don't buy too much. If it drops pretty hard, buy again. The goal is to reduce your average purchase price.

Hold till you think it's appropriate to sell.

The more money you have, the more you can diversify your portfolio.

Don't use your savings, only what you will never need.

Be prepared to lose it all at the start. And lose up to 75% every 8 years when you begin to slowly diversify your portfolio.

If you don't know what you're doing. Buy an index when it's low/drops. I'm a big fan of the Netherlands.

Ps. Crisis ain't over yet.

You’re being downvoted because you’re mentioning a strategy. This is not educational. Furthermore, as someone who does a lot of quantitative research on the market I’m not convinced at all that your strategy will beat the market when adjusting for risk.

You also say things that are unintelligible to someone who knows nothing about the market. Buy undervalued stocks? What does that mean? Most people think stocks with lower share prices are cheaper — let alone something that’s not dead wrong like evaluating based off P/E ratio, which is still incredibly wrong.

So I’d recommend against giving trading advice to someone asking for how to educate themselves.

Ok, seems fair.

I was just giving 2 cents on practical learnings, which is indeed not an answer to his posed question. But perhaps useful in the idea behind the question ( starting with trading stocks).

Most important take-away from it: you can lose a lot.

Additionally, I always asses for risk. Eg. I lost 0€ because of Covid, because I had no stocks when the markets dropped.

I didn't mention how to pick stocks though, which is the most important thing. Since there are multiple reasons why you would pick a certain stock.

Eg. Markets re-open worldwide => I bought WTI on 29/04, endresult was 40%.

I'm positioning myselve right now to multiple market scenarios with an expected (gamble) vaccine in December 2020 ( which is pretty early, I know) and where the vaccine test results come in at the end of the summer. I'm also taken into account the pumped up market by the US government and potential geopolitical issues.

These things can't be done by a AI/ML right now. There is literally no precedent for it.

--

Just a question, what would your general strategy be? I did check out technical indicators in the past, but I have a hard time believing in it.

In the end, I believe the stock market is about emotions in a numbers "game". It's not that quantitive as most people think.

What's your take on that statement?