Ask HN: How did you learn about stocks and the market?

One is economics. This is a social science, like psychology, and deals with human beings, and why they act the way they do: why prices go up and down, the effect of regulation and policy, supply and demand, etc. Economics is the bedrock underlying any market because ultimately, markets are made up of people. It's sort of like how math underlies all of programming -- you don't often use it directly, but it's the intellectual foundation of all market behavior.

To learn economics, get a basic micro textbook or listen to Russ Roberts' EconTalk. It's an outstanding scholarly podcast once/week with a huge range of topics including environmental regulation, financial market behavior, food and cuisine, and the effect of law on public welfare.

The second major discipline is finance. In a nutshell, finance is all about trading flows of money, and how that's priced: if you promise to pay me tomorrow, how much should I pay you today? What is a 10% interest in a company worth? Part of finance is "corporate finance", which is "I have a company, how should I fund it" and the other part is "financial economics", which deals with markets for stocks/derivatives/options etc. and how they're priced and traded. Finance is built on economics, because the whole reason financial markets exist is to facilitate the reorganization of money/capital to better align with peoples' preferences: saving vs. spending, borrowing vs. investing, etc.

The third major discipline is business management/analysis. You'll learn this if you work anywhere for a while: how companies operate, why people are hired/fired, etc.

Mostly, just take it in a little at a time, be curious, and pay attention to the markets. Read the news. For instance, there's a lot of discussion about what the Fed will do, raise vs. lower rates. Why does this matter? How will it affect output (how much is produced), securities prices, and firms decision to invest (build stuff) vs hold cash? What will the effect on the housing market be? Will mortgage rates go up or down? Try to fit this into a conceptual model of how the world works, and refine it over time.

EDIT: Accounting, especially tax, is also important. Accounting is the basic language of business. If you want to understand the words people on TV/news are using, like "non-GAAP" or "gross margin" or "restatement", learn a bit of accounting.

I have read both and you can safely skip most chapters. I can summarize for you, that based on your description in this post, you are what Ben Graham calls a Defensive Investor, as you want to preserve capital without being able to make significant time or resources towards exploring companies in-depth.

The modern way to be a Defensive Investor is to invest 50-50 in a stock and bond ETF/index fund, such as VTI and BND. It provides broad, safe exposure that mimics how you would have done it in Graham's day. If in the future you find wanting to put the time into your investments, that is when I would consider becoming an Enterprising Investor, at which point you should read that chapter in II, and read Margin of Safety.

So if someone makes an elevator pitch for some stock, what I would be asking is why these pros are going to outweigh these cons.

And that's where we're back to square one where everything is just opinion and ituition, albeit better informed, which has to count for something.

I'd like to add some sort of quantitative discipline into the mix. And I mean something that has some statistical credibility.

Since the fastest way in the market to make a million dollars has historically been to start with two million, in todays markets one would need to start with 10 million.

Today 99% of profitable market trades are automated. You will neither have the hardware infrastructure, technical accumen, or market/insider knowledge to EVER compete. You may eventually acquire a sufficient technical understanding. Individually you will never gain the other two.

If you want to "gamble" then I would suggest you figure out how much money you are willing to lose. If it is less than five digits, you will have neither enough for learning nor enough to survive setbacks. Initial minor choice: take this cash to Vegas rather than Wall St.

Once you have your trading account setup and funded, leave it alone for the next month. Watch market news. Read analysis. Join trading forums. Once you are reasonably fluent in the lingo and action, go back to your trading account. Second decision point: IF you are still interested in losing all that cash sitting in the account (think of what you could have used it for this past month, or how much it will accrue in your IRA/401k/saving account), then start tracking sectors which appeal to you.

Develop analysis to track stocks/sectors/etc in such a way that you feel you have insights to offer into the above discussion venues.

Now, the hard part. If you have spent sufficient time to gain understanding, and still have an interest in spending even greater time, then you are ready to start gambling for real.

You will have developed specific sectors/equities which you are interested in trading and so will have a reasonable idea about what to bet on. Do so with 1/4 or 1/3 of your cash. Decide entry, exit and bail out prices. Ignore these at the certainty of loss. Make a buy order, keeping your perviously intuited prices in mind. Wait for either a profit sale or a stop-loss sale. After sale, assess every step of you process. What was accurate? Wrong? Unclear? Resolve all these questions.

Repeat this process until you have no more trading cash available in your account.

Final decision: Either: scrimp, scrounge, beg, borrow and steal another stake; deposit into account and enter a lifelong addictive passion of passing your own money into the coffers of "others." OR: acknowledge you have neither the time, interest, expertise, insider knowledge, infrastructure access or capital to continue this gambling and walk away.

Option 1 will cost you money, health and familial ties. Option 2 will earn you great wealth and free time.

Good luck. Have fun storming the markets and don't say you weren't warned.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...