Finding good resources online isn’t easy. Especially with all of the misleading marketing around investment education. So we’ve compiled a list of our favourite online resources, podcasts and tools to help you on your way.
We’ve focussed on resources that are affordable and while we cannot take any responsibility for the quality of the content they are in our opinion the better resources available.
Also before you go anywhere, bookmark this page!
Basics
For the question of where should I start? This is it!
SpreadJunction [Market simulator]
Cost: Free-$10/m
You wouldn’t do brain surgery without practicing right? Practice trading historical data on the most popular markets using professional charts. SpreadJunction allows you to get a full days worth of trading experience in just couple of minutes.
BabyPips School of Pipsology [Online course]
Cost: Free
One of the best free online resources available. If you ask anyone online where to start learning about trading this is probably where they will send you. Check out the school.
Stock trading bootcamp [Online course]
Cost: $30
One of the best online courses we’ve found that is focussed on technical trading. At only £25/$30 the people at Smarter Trades Group have done a great job of putting together this juggernaut of a course. 16 hours of very well structured, produced, articulated and motivating content.
How to make money in stocks [Book]
Cost: $22
There are a lot of good books out there you could read. If you haven’t read any, start here. It will help you understand how the markets work and has a good set of tools and approaches around investing your money.
Stock Market Investing 101 [Online course]
Cost: $99
We’ve not tried this course but it is popular with business schools and the curriculum covers a broad spectrum of core investing principals. At only $99 it’s a lot cheaper than going to college.
Investoo [Online course]
Cost: Free – $99/m
Again another course we haven’t yet reviewed but having reviewed the free videos we can say that it’s probably not a bad provider overall. While production values were a little more basic the amount of information provided was not lacking.
Market Hours
Very basic but very useful to know which markets have the highest volumes at different times. If you’re planning on trading in your spare time you might want to choose a session that fits your availability
Tools
There’s a lot on offer out there and costs ranges from free to very expensive. Start with the bare minimum, spending more money does not equal high returns.
TradingView [Charting]
Cost: Free-$??/m
Hands down one of the best charting tools and communities available. Most people should start and end here. Best of all it’s largely free! You also get access to a community of traders and can see and share trading ideas.
MarketInOut [Stock screener]
Cost: Free to $139 for 6 months
Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to invest in. Or if you really want to find stocks that are crossing through a moving average while also undersold on MACD? MarketInOut does this for you as well as backtesting strategies. It’s also free to try!
PastStat [Stock screener]
Cost: Free to $99/m
Another very good and quite easy to use screener that allows you screen stocks
FinViz [Visualisation & Screener]
Cost: Free
As well as their very good and free stock screener they also have some very cool financial visualisations.
Day Trading Life [Spreadsheets]
Cost: Free
There’s nothing like a good spreadsheet to help work out what’s going one. Here you can find Expectency, Spreadbetting and Losing streak probability calculators.
TraderVue [Trade Journal]
Cost: Free – $49/m
Retrospectively reviewing your trades and understanding why you acted in the way you did is critical to self-improvement. It allows you to identify bad habits and work on fixing them. TraderVue helps you do that.
Podcasts
We’re a big fan of podcasts, you get huge insights through interviews and information that just can’t be communicated in print. The best of the best, often produced for the good of the community here are the blogs & podcasts that we regularly read and listen to.
Chat with Traders
Aaron Fifield is doing a sterling job interviewing successful traders to understand what is working best for them. Started in 2015, now with 80 episodes in he’s got one a great collection of trader interviews. Lovely site design as well, good effort!
Spreadbet beginner
Chris Chillingworth has been running Spreadbet beginner since 2011 and started a fantastic podcast in 2015. Not just limited to spread betting Chris covers key concepts such as risk management, motivation and other trading related topics.
TrendFollowing
Referenced in books as well, Michael Covel is a well known author and trader, his site has 600+ trading podcasts in its history.
ClayTrader
We’re always a little sceptical when we see individuals selling lots of ‘courses’ and access to their ‘inner circle’. However Clay provides a solid podcast and plenty of good free resources that make this worth checking out.
Traders Podcast
Rob Booker has been podcasting about trading since podcasting began. With 500+ episodes and over 1m downloads of his book. He’s well worth listening to.
@GhostDigg on Twitch
Technically not a podcast and possibly discontinued @Ghostdigg still has a collection of live trading sessions where he talked through his analysis and basis for opening trades. Invaluable if you want to see a profitable trader in action.
Blogs
Some of these are lesser known but still very worthwhile blogs to keep your eye on.
Fallond Picks
Daily blog with heavy emphasis on technical trading lots of interesting short-medium term analysis along with insights into market drivers.
Abnormal returns
One of the more popular trading blogs, Tadas Viskanta got started in 2005. Lots of topical posts with links to news and companies that are worth looking at.
BiiWii
Great in depth economic analysis of what is driving the market and drivers behind current market movements.
1nvestor
Really nice short posts with clear technical analysis and expectation.
AverageJoeDayTradr
While posts are not always regular @AverageJoeTradr pushes out well thought out and detailed posts.
Authors
Warren Buffet – @WarrenBuffet
Perhaps an obvious first choice. One of the best selling authors of all time and also one of the worlds richest men to boot. Start with his book ‘The Intelligent Investor’ you can find that and his other titles here.
Michael Covel – Trend Following
The self branded alternative to Warren Buffet, Michael Covel is well known, here you can find info on his books, podcast
Jason Kelly
Perhaps not as prolific an author as Buffet or Covel, Jason Kelly’s books are a worth while addition to your library or kindle.
Van Thrap
Well known in trading circles his book ‘Trade your way to financial freedom’ provides a good insight into what you need as a trader and how to develop your skills.
Benjamin Graham
More focussed on the long term his book ‘The intelligent investor’ has sold over 1 million copies, he also has a number of other books on analysing stocks. Buy, read, digest.
A few others books worth reading include Alex’s Frey’s book ‘A beginners guide to investing‘ is a very informative book on investing basics. Darren Hardy’s book ‘The compound effect‘ isn’t strictly a trading book but a worthwhile read if you’re goal is building your wealth.
News/Analysis
Keeping up to date with what’s going on in the economy is crucial to ensuring that you’re making the right decisions.
City Falcon
One of our favourite tools, it monitors over 100+ financial publications and twitter for news on the markets you’re following. It’s also free, presumably while in beta which is awesome.
DailyFX
Great place to find out about the currency markets, sentiment and analysis of your favourite forex pairs.
StockTrader
Though primarily an education provider they provide a very good daily market analysis for free on their blog.
MorningStar
Solid economic news, they also premium service with analyst reports, their own stockscreener and premium newsletters.
Street Sleuth
A financial news aggregator site that gives you top stories from over 200 news sources in one place. Though slightly bewildering from a choice perspective you can easily find plenty of content to read.
Forex Live
Regular news and analysis from the world of Forex.
Defacto news
I will include The Economist, Bloomberg, CNBC, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal in a single line as these are defacto financial news sources and you shouldn’t need to be told about them.
Mobile apps
As of publishing most of the apps we’re aware of are mainly news based. They all provide similar functionality that is to say, news, information on markets and watchlists. We’re keeping our eyes out for more mobile based tools.
Investing.com (iOS/Android)
As well as providing a solid online news portal, their mobile app is one of best you can use to track markets and news. It also has a really nice simple inbuilt charting tool which is very useful.
Yahoo Finance (iOS/Android/Windows)
Handily available on Windows devices as well as iOS/Android, the Yahoo finance app brings their content to your mobile as you would expect.
Bloomberg.com (iOS/Android)
Get access to news, videos and key statistics on markets. It also has a handy watchlist function that you can use to monitor your active investments.
MarketWatch.com (iOS/Android)
Nice easy to use app that has everything you would expect. The charts don’t feel quite as strong as those on Investing.com’s app though.
Books/Articles/Bookmarks
Occasionally you stumble on a book, article or site that you really like…
Determining Expectancy – TraderMike.net
LearningMarkets provide courses on trading but this article is particularly useful if you’re new to trading.
Profit F Trading Methods – ProfitF.com
Probably one of the best collections of well documented trading strategies that we’ve found so far.
John Murphys Ten Laws of Technical Trading – StockCharts.com
A really great post. The Chief Technical Analyst at StockCharts.com presents his collection of recommendations that he frequently offers to people that are new to Technical Analysis.
10 things I wish I knew about trading before I started – StockTrader.com
Great article highlighting some of the key misunderstanding and mistakes made by new traders.
Free education resources – StockTrader.com
A positive gold mine of content from Blain at StockTrader.
Forums & Communities
When you need a shoulder to cry on or somewhere to ask questions…
TradingView
Already mentioned once above, TradingView deserves a second mention. As well as great charts they have a community of traders sharing their ideas and some lively chat rooms.
EliteTrader
A very active forum of traders where you can find answers to many questions and see the opinions of others.
Trade2Win
Another great forum similar to Elite trader with a buzzing and active community.
ForexFactory
Well established forex forum with an absolute ton of information and plenty of people you can talk to or get feedback from.
Other resources worth a mention
Zanger Report [Signals] $125/m – Don’t let the retro site design fool you, Zanger made $42m from $11k in the 90’s so he probably knows what he’s talking about 😉
Briefing.com [News] From $50/m – Live market analysis and briefings like the sort you might get if you were working in an investment bank.
eSignal [Charting] $45-$295/m – Fairly advanced charting tool that also does pattern recognition. Worth checking out.
Money.net [Charting] $150/m – Another charting tool worthing looking at.
MarketSmith [Charting + Pattern recognition] $999/yr – Last one, great tool that provides plenty of data and some nice pattern recognition.
You might notice that we’ve carefully avoided talking about brokers in this article, we’ll do a separate piece on them another time.