[Trading]

Hi David,

I have recently visited your website and am enjoying the videos on the stock and forex market, thank you! I saw your email address on the website and while I know you are probably very busy, I was hoping you might have time for a question. I am wondering how you would advise someone who would like to learn, work in, and invest in the financial markets? I am 26 years old living in Washington and plan on starting an MBA program this year. I am becoming increasingly interested in learning as much as possible about the financial world, and would like to eventually find some employment in this field and learn about how one can invest wisely and successfully. What are the better books to read, websites to visit, magazines to subscribe to, people to interact with, and how does one focus their studies with all of the information that is available?

Thank you again for the great website and videos. I am sorry if my questions are too broad, but in brief, I am just wondering what a beginner needs to do in familiarizing himself with the financial/economic world, while zeroing in on the financial markets, and eventually finding the right kind of employment in this field.

Thanks again!

[David Waring]

hi Trading,

Glad to hear from you and thank you for the comment I am glad you like the site.

The first thing to keep in mind is that there is a difference between trading and investing. In general traders focus heavily on charts and are more short term in nature where investors focus more on fundamentals and are generally longer term in nature.

I always think it is a good idea to learn about investing before venturing into trading. We have some good videos on the topic here at InformedTrades which you can find in the basics of money course here and in module 5 of Airelon's basics of trading course.

With the exception of those two courses this site is mostly focused on trading, so if you are interested in learning more about the trading side of things then I would recommend going through the courses in the Informed Trades University for Traders here.

For a great site on investing I would recommend The Motley Fool.

As far as books go some books that I recommend for traders along with my comments on each are located in the InformedTrades book store here.

Books I would recommend for investing are Beating the Street by Peter Lynch and the Boggleheads Guide to Investing by John Bogle.

Lastly I would recommend keeping up with the major events that are affecting the market each day so you can begin to have a feel for what moves the markets and be able to talk intelligently to other market participants about what is going on. As you will notice if you visit the homepage of Informedtrades.com each day I post a market update with all the days main news at 8am and 6pm. Feel free to hit the reply button on those posts if there are things that don't make sense or that you would otherwise like to comment on and I will respond there.

Hope that helps. Please feel free to post any other questions or comments.

Best Regards,
Dave