How to learn about the stock market for beginners

learning about the stock market

Written by Charaf Mrah

Hi there! I'm a Software Engineering major currently studying in college. The purpose of this website is to share my learnings and insights with you, in the hopes of providing value and assistance to those who may need it.

Updated Nov 15, 2020

The stock market in my imagination used to be like a black box that contained many graphs and terminologies that I didn’t understand. The only easy explanation that you can get about stocks is: if you buy a stock, that means you bought a very small percentage of a company. That’s true, but it in no way makes you understand the whole stock market and how it works.

During quarantine I had a lot of time to spare discovering new topics. The stock market was one of them. It wasn’t the easiest thing to learn about, and the reason for that isn’t because the material itself is hard. The material is quite easy actually, but the information is all over the place that it takes some time to connect the dots to understand the stock market better. I’ll share with you how I learned about the stock market (I’m not an expert by no means by now I understand what people are talking about). It takes a long time to become an expert in stock but learning the basics will set you up to take the deeper information later on.

1 – Investopedia (complete tutorial about stocks)

There’s a website called Investopedia that works kind of like a Wikipedia about investments. They have a very great series : Investing: an introduction this series are hugely beneficial if you want to learn more about the stock market. It especially helps with the new words and terminologies that you will encounter during your learning process about the stock market (it can get confusing sometimes).

I suggest that you go through all of these articles that take you through the basics and what every word means. And if you ever encounter another word that you don’t understand later on, you’ll probably find that word in Investopedia.

2 – YouTube videos about the stock market

This is the trickiest one in my opinion, because there are many scammers and people giving information but in a sometimes tricky way. However there are many genuine people that take their jobs and integrity seriously and give correct information without scamming you into doing anything.

One of these people, and the only one I can recommend right now since I didn’t dive deep into other people’s content is: Nate O’Brien. He’s a young guy with some experience in the stock market. What I like about him the most is that he gives out a lot of information without asking you to join his 10.000$ course (he doesn’t have any -yet). I’m sure you can find other good YouTube videos as well but this is the one that I recommend for absolute beginners now.

3 – Stocks app

Every phone nowadays has a stocks app (if yours doesn’t you can download one for free). I suggest that you open the app and look at different stock and compare them to their competitors. This is not to do research about a certain company or stock it’s just simply looking to get familiar with what’s going on and how the stock market goes.

It’s important to have some time to get familiar with the stock market before you dump all your money into it. Experience is very important, and at this stage you can learn a lot simply by just looking at different stocks and adding the interesting ones to your watch list. Getting familiar with all the different metrics and weird graphs can take some time, keep doing it until the app doesn’t scare you anymore.

4 – Books about the stock market for beginners

I kept books as the last part because they can be extremely boring especially if you don’t care about money as much. While money and investing is very important to live a good life, it can be boring to think about it for me. And in order to even understand the books you need to have some basic understanding about the terminologies to be able to follow along.

There are many many books about investing in the stock market. But in every field there’s always a set of books that everyone must read. Since I’m not an expert in the matter yet, I will give you the list the Nate O’Brien suggested that I already started reading (not done yet):

  • The Intelligent Investor
  • Technical Analysis For Dummies
  • One Up on Wall Street
  • A Random Walk Down Wall Street
  • Security Analysis

This should be enough to get you equipped with the basics in order to understand more advanced stuff if you want to dive even deeper into it. For me this is probably enough, I got other priorities that I think are more important for me right now than investing, but it’s always good to learn about new topics.

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