The BEST Places to Learn Investing

In this video, I cover all of my favorite resources I've used to learn investing and trading for free.

Something I’ve been asked a lot lately is where I learned how to invest and how do I research stocks, so in this video, I’m going to share with you some of my favorite resources where you can learn for free.

And of course, I’m not an investing or trading expert. I’ve only really been actively trading for a year, so I’m constantly learning and always trying to get better. Also, I like to try and learn as much as I can from free resources as possible, so just about all of these will be things you don’t have to pay for.

Investing vs. Trading

Let me also clarify between investing and trading. Investing is more of a long-term buy-and-hold strategy to gradually build wealth. An example of this would be a retirement account like a 401(k) or an IRA. You’re probably not logging in every day to check on the performance and make adjustments to your holdings. You’re letting time do it’s thing.

With trading, you’re looking at more short-term transactions that can get you higher returns. So maybe you have a Webull or Robinhood or TD Ameritrade account that you actively buy and sell stocks and options in for fun. Since it is more active, you’ll probably hope to get more than 8% annual returns.

And, of course, you could actually trade inside of a retirement account, and you can also just buy and hold in a regular brokerage account, so those are just examples.

For me, I tend to lean more to the trading side of things. My approach is to use limited funds to start and trade my way up instead of doing regular deposits once a month or whatever. This can be difficult, but it also limits my actual losses to whatever I deposit.

When it comes to investing, I have a few retirement accounts and a few smaller accounts that I kickstarted with $1,000. My goal for this year is to make consistent deposits every month to long-term investing portfolio, which consists of ETFs and shares of companies I like.

Regardless of what you’re looking to do based off of your own interests and finance goals, let’s talk about how you can start to learn. Like most things, I’m only self-taught, so I’ve relied on a lot of free resources to help me along the way.

Stock Market Fundamentals

If you find the stock market completely baffling, you need to start building a foundation of knowledge. My favorite resource for learning the basics is the website Investopedia. While they do have courses available to purchase, I’ve never paid for anything on their site. Instead, there are hundreds of free articles breaking down terminology and concepts. So if you hear everyone talking about a short squeeze, you can just type that into Investopedia… and read an entire article breaking down the concept and terminology for you.

If you want to learn about Trading Platforms & Tools… well, guess what – it’s all right here. If you want to know what a bullish pennant is, just search for it. Same with anything else. Just search and read. I’ve learned so much from Investopedia without spending a dime.

If you want to do some research on a particular company, I recommend checking out FinViz. Type in the ticker of the stock you want to learn about and FinViz will pull up it’s chart… all the numbers you want to know.

Then, if you see something like P slash E and don’t know what it means, well you can hover over it and it’ll tell you what it stands for. Then you can hop back over to Investopedia and read about Price-to-Earnings Ratios.

There’s a lot of other stuff on here as well. There’s a scanner which essentially filters out companies based on the criteria you select. Let’s say you want to find companies that have over a $200 billion market cap that also have a dividend yield of over 3%... and it then shows us the 5 stocks that meet this criteria. Oh, and if you want to learn more about what a dividend yield is, guess what? That’s right, go to investopedia and start reading about it!

Also, speaking of dividends, you can go to dividend.com to get more dividend-specific info. They do kind of push their premium plan on you for $150 year, which I don’t pay for and I recommend you do as much learning as you can for free, but it can give you some ideas that you can take and research elsewhere.

Stock Options

Stock options have exploded in popularity among retail traders in the past few years thanks mainly to Robinhood and WallStreetBets. If you aren’t familiar with stock options, they allow you to control 100 shares of a company with 1 contract. This 1 contract is generally a lot cheaper than actually buying 100 shares of the company, so it allows you to use leverage to potentially make way more money. Or lose way more money.

Personally, I love trading stock options, but it’s definitely not for everyone. There is more risk involved with stock options because your options can expire worthless… where a share of a company is probably not going to go to $0.

It can be confusing and scary to learn, so once you’ve read the basics on Investopedia, time to head to YouTube. A great channel for learning options strategies is called Option Alpha. He has over 2,000 videos all about options that can really help you get a better understanding of how they work and the different strategies you can use for various situations.

Another YouTube channel that’s great for helping you wrap your head around options is InTheMoney. Adam is super smart and really demystifies options by breaking down the math on them and how you can benefit by trading them. If you want to learn options, seriously, dive in and watch all of his videos, and you should feel like you have a pretty good grasp on them.

Next on the list is TastyTrade. They’ve got free courses on options trading tailored for beginners. They also have a ton of shows like Mike and His Whiteboard where he breaks down options in a lot of detail, going from basic concepts to more advanced strategies.

Technical Analysis

Technical Analysis is one of those things that can be a little polarizing. Some people think that it doesn’t work and some people make a living by trading off of it. Either way, with technical analysis, you’re looking for patterns and trends with price movement and volume to get a better idea of where the price may go next. This is more used with trading than investing, but either way, it’s good to know about.

Back on YouTube, WyseTrade has some nice videos on utilizing different indicators and identifying candlestick patterns. While they don’t have a lot of videos, the ones they do have are pretty in-depth and helpful. They use Forex for their examples, but the same concepts apply to stocks. Also on YouTube is Rayner Teo. He’s one of the bigger YouTubers covering technical analysis, but he has tons of videos for you to learn from. He also has a blog with written articles if you prefer learning that way.

Trade Ideas

Next, if you’re just looking for trade ideas, there are a few places that may be helpful. The first one is Reddit. And no, not WallStreetBets, even thought every once in awhile there is a good gem in there, now – especially after adding 7 million new members – it’ll be harder to find the useful ideas. Instead, check out the Options sub-reddit. There does tend to be some spillover from WallStreetBets, but it is definitely more serious. Not only can you learn a lot from questions that get answered, but you can get an idea for what other traders look for and what tickers they are considering trading options on.

I also find some Discord groups can be good places to bounce ideas around and get an idea of what other traders think of different setups and stocks. The YouTube channel Dumb Money has a free Discord group with thousands of members. People will post thoughtful due diligence on different trade ideas and discuss trade ideas in all sorts of different sectors, so it can be a good place to get some companies on your radar that you may not have even thought of.

Also, the YouTuber Trades by Matt has a free Discord group as well. This one is a little more focused on Futures trading, but they will also discuss equities and options, and… play chess I guess?

Anyways, the point is trading can be an isolating profession or hobby or whatever it is, so I do recommend finding a community of people that you can learn from.

FinTwit

On a related note, I do recommend following some people from the financial world on Twitter. From trade ideas, to option flow, to political and financial news, to just insight and opinions from people with a lot of experience in the financial world, this can be a good way to get outside any echo chamber you may find yourself in. Some people on here will have bad takes or just be wrong about things, but it can always be good to find a balance of different view points.

Books

I also get asked if I’d recommend any books on trading. The only book I’d recommend for trading is Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. Trading is a huge psychological game and this book seeks to get your mind right. I have the audiobook and honestly, I’m still working my way through it, but I haven’t read any other books when it comes to trading.

With investing in general, there are of course classic books like The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham or The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle, but I haven’t read either of those. I have read a bunch of other books on personal finance and business, which I could really make a whole video out of, so we’ll get more into that another time.

Real Estate

Now to take a little turn away from the stock market, if you’re interested in real estate investing, I cannot recommend BiggerPockets enough. I believe it’s the largest social network for real estate investors online, with a huge forum covering just about every topic imaginable, blog posts, how-to guides, and investment calculators. Just about everything you need is free, too, so that’s great.

On the same note, The Bigger Pockets podcast is a really great resource as well. I’ve listened to hundreds of episodes of this podcast and learned so much from every episode, so if you want to learn more about real estate investing, it’s a must-listen. They also have another podcast called The Bigger Pockets Business Podcast, which covers more small business and entrepreneurial topics. I love business, so I find it fascinating and if that’s something you’re into, you’ll probably feel the same way.

If you want to learn more about real estate investing and flipping vacant land – which I’ve done before – I recommend checking out ReTipster.com. This is where I started learning years ago, and the site has just kept growing with lots of useful blog posts and a podcast to go along with it.

Final Thoughts

These are all of my favorite resources to learn from, but I’m sure I left out some really good ones.

As always, try to keep your money in your pocket as you’re learning. There are a lot of services and courses out there, but I believe you can learn so much for free. It is hard, and it does take time and commitment to really start to wrap your head around it. There really is no shortcut to it, but I believe all of the resources I mentioned in this video can help you on your way.

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