Ask HN: Best resources to learn about stock trading and investing?

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

marketgod · 6 years ago

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.

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.

compumike · 6 years ago

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

imakwana · 6 years ago

+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...

darkteflon · 6 years ago

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

PopeDotNinja · 6 years ago

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

opportune · 6 years ago

Closi · 6 years ago

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!

marcusverus · 6 years ago

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

mandeepj · 6 years ago

> he couldn't beat the S&P

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

divbzero · 6 years ago

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/

torte · 6 years ago

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.

hbcondo714 · 6 years ago

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...

brockwhittaker · 6 years ago

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.

lutusp · 6 years ago

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.

andrei_says_ · 6 years ago

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)?

nilram · 6 years ago