Learning about investing

Hi everyone :wave:

As you may or may not know, I write a lot of the content at Freetrade. One of the things we send out every Saturday is the Weekend Read, which you can (and should!) sign up to here.

A lot of Weekend Readers (yes, I just made that up) ask about things they can watch, read or listen to in order to learn more about investing. There have been threads about this before but I thought it could be good to start anew and post a few things here.

Personally, I am a big reader and, though I love podcasts too, I am yet to find one on investing that excites me. There are two books I tend to recommend to readers that should be interesting regardless of how much you know;

  • Thomas Sowell — Basic Economics

  • Terry Burnham — Mean Markets and Lizard Brains

Recently I have been reading:

  • Nassim Taleb — Skin in the Game (not exactly about investing but still some principles there)

  • David Schwartz — Stock Market Handbook (a lot of stats, arguably sophistry but still interesting!)

A couple of other resources that I find useful

  • Seeking Alpha — Pro version is a little pricey but you can still find some really great/out of the box analysis on this website.

  • Investor’s Chronicle — Again, you may have to pay for this but a lot of their articles are free online. If you do buy a copy, you’ll probably find a lot of interesting stuff, regardless of how experienced you are.

Always happy to hear suggestions / learn about new resources, so comment below if there’s something you want to add :point_down:

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The most important book on investing is imho ‘A random walk down wall street’ by Malkiel.

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Never underestimate the “For Dummies” series!
I have read “Stock investing for dummies” (new edition released in July) which is great.
I have also read “Fundamental Analysis for dummies”.
“Candlestick charting for dummies” is my next read, but Technical analysis doesn’t resonate with me quite as much as Fundamental so i’m sure that one will take some motivation.

Steve Ruffley’s “Ruff guide to trading” also started well, but he uses a lot of trading jargon and quite a bit of technical analysis- so i’ll go back to that once i’ve read a few more basic books.

Also- I use numerous Audiobooks for bicycle rides/cooking/daily chores to top up the knowledge.

I recommend only choosing audiobooks with minimal charts and graphs- perhaps technical analysis is best left for paper form!

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Side note- I also read Basic Economic as mentioned in OP- very concise, clear and easy to read for such a complex subject. However be aware of bias hidden in apparent “non-bias”.

Does anyone know a good course of fundamental analysis? I’d like to know more about that. Sure, a book is an option, but I think I could enjoy it more with someone explaining it.