21 Best Ways to Learn Stock Trading in 2023

The best way to learn stock trading is with a professional investing course, but can also learn stock trading for free or at little cost with books, audiobooks, movies, and documentaries.

As a Certified Financial Technical Analyst with the International Federation of Technical Analysts with 20 years of investing experience, I believe I can show you how to learn stock trading.

How to learn about the stock market

To learn about the stock market, you can learn its history through stock market statistics, its volatility and crashes, and understand common stock market terminology.

Overall the stock market is a capital distribution engine designed to maximize wealth creation for those who invest in companies.

Learn how to trade stocks

Long-term investors and stock traders all trade stocks. If you want to learn how to trade stocks as a trader, you need to learn technical analysis. If you want to invest in stocks over the long term, you need to learn stock investing strategies such as value investing, growth investing and income investing.

Teach yourself stock trading

You can teach yourself stock trading using books, audiobooks, movies, podcasts, youtube videos, and online stock trading courses. Teaching yourself stock trading and investing takes a lot of work, there are no shortcuts, and you should not take undue risks with your capital.

Learn about stocks

If you want to learn about specific stocks and companies, you need to learn the process of stock research. Stock market analysts and stock advisory services can perform stock research for you for a price, saving you time, but you will need to understand how to analyze a stock for yourself.

You need to understand that there are no get-rich-quick schemes.

21 Best Ways to Learn Stock Trading

The top 21 best ways to learn stock trading include great books, online communities, software, videos, audiobooks, and training courses.

1. Read stock trading books

Stock investing and trading books take time to read and study, but they provide a rich source of knowledge and wisdom.

With thousands of books to read, where do you start? Check out our Top 20 Best Stock Market Investing Books Review.  If you want to be a stock trader, look at the top 13 books that professional market technical analysts study to qualify for IFTA (International Federation of Technical Analysts) or C.M.T. (Chartered Market Technician) certifications.

Here you will find a hand-picked selection of simply the best finance and investing books ever written, including a detailed review and ratings based on the books’ content, practicality, and readability.

Top 5 Best Stock Market Investing Books

• The Little Book that Still Beats the Market: Best for long-term investors
• How to Make Money in Stocks: Best for growth investing
• One Up On Wall Street: Great for Stock Selection
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: Simple Investing Strategy
• Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: The Bible of Technical Analysis

2. Watch stock market documentaries

You can learn about the stock market with high-quality documentary movies that provide insights into finance, corporations, international business, or even stock market scams.Sit back with your feet up and convince your partner to watch a film, perhaps the Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, or my favorite, Inside Job. Read our Top 20 Best Stock Market & Financial Movies Review to find a great film to watch, guaranteed not to bore you.

Learn, be astounded, and also disgusted at the behavior of the money-hungry elites. I guarantee you will be shocked by the true stories and even entertained by Hollywood.

6 Best Finance Documentaries

1. Capitalism: A Love Story (2009): Finance Documentary
2. The China Hustle (2018): Finance Documentary
3. Freakonomics (2010): Finance & Economics Documentary
4. Banking On Bitcoin (2017): Finance Documentary
5. The Corporation (2003): Finance Documentary
6. The Ascent of Money (2008): Finance Documentary

3. Use a structured process

This video will guide you through the entire process of learning stock market trading, with every high-quality free, and low-cost resource available.

4. Learn to trade with audiobooks

You can learn stock trading with excellent audiobooks that teach you everything from hedge funds, investing strategies, trading tactics, and how the financial system operates.

Are you bored of reading? Have too much energy to sit down and watch a stock trading movie. Why not listen to a great book while commuting, gardening, or walking the dog.

Our Top 20 Best Stock Market & Finance Audio Books Review has some great listens, such as the highly-rated “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis or “The Quants” by Scott Patterson.  Fill your day with learning while not being chained to your desk.

10 great stock market audiobooks

1. The Little Book that Still Beats the Market – Joel Greenblatt
2. The Little Book of Common Sense Investing – John C. Bogle
3. The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing – Taylor Larimore
4. The New Buffettology – Mary Buffett
5. The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
6. Flash Boys – Machine Trading Impact on the Stock Market – Michael Lewis
7. Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders – Scott Patterson
8. Liars Poker – Stocks, Bonds & Leveraged Trading – Michael Lewis
9. The Big Short – Financial Crisis 2008 True Story
10. The Quants – Impact of HFT Trading on Financial Markets

Additionally, you can listen to a Stock Market Podcast – The Liberated Stock Trader provides useful lessons via our Learn Stock Market Trading Podcast Series – search for Liberated Stock Trader on your smartphone.

5. Start a free stock trading course

There are many free stock trading courses available, but many educators have no formal experience or certifications in stock analysis or fund management.

Liberated Stock Trader offers four free stock trading courses written by a certified market analyst.

Our Free Trading Courses Include

• Course 101 – Introduction to Investing
• Course 102 – Stock Market Investing
• Course 103 – Technical Analysis

6. Take a professional training course

Choosing a professional stock trading course will help you learn about stocks faster with books, videos, and projects, so you can save time and gain more experience.

Liberated Stock Trader offers the “PRO Stock Trader Training” to enable you to gain the knowledge and confidence you need.

 

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You want to be a successful stock investor but don’t know where to start.

Learning stock market investing on your own can be overwhelming. There’s so much information out there, and it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not.

Liberated Stock Trader Pro Investing Course
Our pro investing classes are the perfect way to learn stock investing. You will learn everything you need to know about financial analysis, charts, stock screening, and portfolio building so you can start building wealth today.
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7. Learn trading with a community

If you want to learn to trade with other stock traders, then TradingView has a community and lively online trading forum with over 3 million traders. I am also part of this community and regularly contribute to my thousands of followers.

Connect with me on TradingView it's free

8. Get free stock charting tools

When learning to trade stocks, you will need good stock charting and analysis software, preferably for free. Here is a list of the best stock trading software available today.

They may not have all the bells and whistles compared to their paid competitors, but they are suitable for beginners and will not put a dent in your wallet. Our review of the 10 Best Free Stock Charting Services on the Web will help you choose.

5 Best Free Stock Charting Software

1. TradingView: Best Free Stock Charting Software, App & Community
2. Stock Rover: Best Free Stock Analysis & Research Tool
3. Finviz: Fast, Free Stock Charting & Screening
4. TC2000: Best Free Charts for Technical Analysis Scanning
5. Yahoo Finance: Good Free Charts, App + Broker Integration

9. Use the best stock trading software

If you want to learn stock trading and invest in high-quality stock research and portfolio management software to help save time and improve your chances of success, you will want to select a premium stock trading service.

You are now progressing in your knowledge and experience in the market and realize that you need key features for your stock trading analysis. Features include backtesting, compelling charts, specific indicators, real-time data, and streaming news. But which packages are the best for you?

We sorted through the many high-quality (and low-quality) Stock Analysis Software vendors to bring you our in-depth review of the Top 10 Stock Market Analysis Software Programs. It’s the best review on the Web (but I would say that, wouldn’t I)

If you are not interested in robust stock chart analysis and are more driven toward stock screening (filtering companies by fundamentals like P E Ratio, Earnings per Share, or Debt to Equity), check out our Stock Screener Review.

Our Picks for Best Premium Stock Market Software

• Winner Best Stock Software Overall: TradingView
• Winner Best Stock Analysis & Research for Investors: Stock Rover
• Best AI Stock Prediction Software & Auto Trading: Trade Ideas
• Best Stock App & Community: TradingView
• Best for Real-time News Trading: Benzinga Pro

10. Find a free stock broker

Learning to stock  trade today means you have a choice of some excellent brokers that offer free stock, ETF, and stock options training.

Read our Best Online Stock Brokers Review, highlighting the best stock brokers for online stock trading for beginners.  The review winner was Firstrade, a first-class U.S.A. broker that recently moved to $0 commission fees; yes, there are zero commissions on trades for market participants.

Our Firstrade and Interactive Brokers reviews also highlight that they are excellent for active traders, meaning those who trade often and hold stocks only for the short term.

Our favorite six brokers are evaluated in detail in our In-Depth Broker Analysis. If you are interested in trading penny stocks, check out our Best Penny Stocks Brokers Review.

If you live outside the U.S.A. but want to trade in the low-cost U.S. markets, read our Guide to U.S. Investing for non-residents.

Advisory Brokers

Make no mistake; advisory brokers make money when you execute a trade.  This means they will always be recommending that you sell a particular stock and buy another one.  They make most of their money on the trade costs and not on the profit because the transaction cost is guaranteed, and the future profit of a particular investment is not.

Your best interests are irrelevant to them. Make your own decisions and minimize your costs with a discount broker.  There are no recommendations for further reading here.

• Take a look at the top 25 best trading platforms

11. Prepare your trading strategy

A key step in learning to trade stocks is deciding your investing strategy. Will you implement a value investing strategy to purchase undervalued stocks, a growth strategy for profiting from stock price growth, or an income strategy to earn money from dividends?

Here are some great articles to help you decide:

• MOSES ETF Investing Strategy: Beat The Market & Lower Risk
• Liberated Stock Trader Beat the Market Growth Stock Strategy
• Find the Best CANSLIM Stocks Using a CANSLIM Stock Screener
• How To Find Undervalued Stocks Like a Pro Value Investor
• How To Analyze Stocks: Fundamental vs. Technical Analysis
• 6 Steps to Build Your Dividend Stock Screener & Strategy

There certainly is a lot to consider when building out your investing strategy.  There are core questions: should you use a day trading strategy versus a buy and hold strategy.  Is Value investing like Warren Buffet for you, or is the more time and nerve intensive swing trading more your style.

You will need to spot and avoid stock market crashes and establish your trading rules based on your stock trading style.  Also, advanced traders will want to ensure their system is back-tested, meaning it has worked in the past.

12. Avoid stock market crashes

Learning stock trading means understanding market direction and trying to understand when the stock will enter a bear market.

MOSES is a stock market index ETF investing system designed to help you beat the market’s performance by avoiding major stock market crashes.

 

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Beat The Market, Avoid Crashes & Lower Your Risks

Nobody wants to see their hard-earned money disappear in a stock market crash.

Over the past century, the US stock market has had 6 major crashes that have caused investors to lose trillions of dollars.

The MOSES Index ETF Investing Strategy will help you avoid or minimize the impact of major stock market crashes. MOSES will alert you before the next crash happens, so you can protect your portfolio. You will also know when the bear market is over, so you can start investing again.

MOSES Helps You Secure & Grow Your Biggest Investments
★ 3 Index ETF Strategies ★
★ Outperforms the NASDAQ 100, S&P500 & Russell 3000 ★
★ Beats the DAX, CAC40 & EURO STOXX Indices ★
★ Buy & Sell Signals Generated ★
MOSES Helps You Sleep Better At Night Knowing You A Prepared For Future Disasters

Find Out More

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A stock market crash is an unfortunate and historically inevitable part of trading, as are tsunamis to the natural world.  Just like tsunamis, stock market crashes devastate those involved.

Prepare yourself for the next market crash by understanding the triggers and warnings that can be seen through technical analysis.

13. Establish stock trading rules

What chart indicators will you use? Under what conditions will you buy a stock? When will you sell a stock? Why did you buy the stock, and are those reasons still valid? So many questions, and here are some answers.

These are all known as trade rules.  Establishing your criteria for buying, holding, and selling a stock before buying it can help take the emotion out of a trade.  Read 10 Steps to a professional stock market system.  Emotions are your worst enemy; you must treat your investment decisions with a dose of logic, not a slice of gut feel.  This is when back-testing comes to the rescue.

14. Learn stock strategy backtesting

When stock trading, you may understand your reasons for a particular trade, but over the long term, is your hypothesis profitable? An untested hypothesis is not worth the paper (or screen) it is written on.

This is what is called back-testing. An example of back-testing is the Stock Market Crash Detector.  This system is focused on trying to predict a stock market crash.  There are numerous elements: stock price fluctuations & price versus specific indicators.  While system back-testing is time-consuming, it helps you understand which of the many indicators, such as Relative Strength Index (RSI), Balance of Power (B.O.P.), Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), actually work in a real-world environment in the past.

While past performance is no indicator of future performance, you can see statistically over thousands of trades what has worked and has not worked.  Read our Top 10 Stock Market Software Review and look at the section Systems & Back-Testing Score to find a suitable product if you want back-testing.

15. Get real-time trading news

If you want to learn to trade active stock market news events, you will need a real-time stream financial news service.

If you want to stay in touch with Macro or Micro Economic Events, you need a good news source.  Trading the news is a strategy some people adopt.   There are many good news sources for you to look at, including Reuters, Bloomberg & Investors Business Daily. However, look at our review-winning Benzinga Pro News Service if you want real-time streaming news and innovative market insight.

“Roll Up, Roll Up, Read All About It”

 

If you trade the news, you will want news delivered in real-time, which might cost.

A Quick Summary of the Most Reliable Market News Services & Apps

1. Benzinga Pro: Real-time stock news for traders
2. MetaStock Refinitiv: Real-time global financial news app
3. Bloomberg: Best finance TV channel 

16. Choose an investment vehicle

Why does Wall Street call them vehicles?  Well, perhaps they want it to sound complicated, or maybe it is a reference to the transportation of your money to another destination.  But when you think about it, a Vehicle is a good analogy.  Stock Investments can be seen as a car; some stocks are Lamborghini’s (fast and exciting yet inefficient), while others are a Toyota Prius (practical, not pretty, but efficient and safe).

Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and index funds are like buses; they are cheap, reliable, and ultimately get you to where you want to go without any effort.  The ETF bus is an excellent place to be. You never have to worry about beating the market; you are always performing at the market with minimum effort and minimum tax implications.

The book Unshakable by Tony Robbins lays out this argument beautifully, as does “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” by John C. Bogle.

Stock Options are fairly complex calculations based on time and price; perhaps it could be called a Segway, although I may be taking the analogy too far now.

Trading Stocks vs. ETFs

If you pick the right stocks, your returns can be excellent. But choosing the best at the right time can be extremely challenging.

What about Index Tracking Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)?  What are they? How do they compare?

Read the Pros and Cons of Stocks versus ETFs and learn more about mutual funds.

Dividends are also a key benefit of investing in company stock. Please find out more about dividend investing in our Dividend Investing Secrets.

Dividends are a great way to secure a reliable fixed-income revenue stream. Our in-depth analysis of the Dividend Kings and Dividend Aristocrats will give you tremendous insight into where to place your investments.

Trading Stock Options

Options were designed as risk protection, but they can be used for profiting greatly.  Providing you focus intensely on strategy and execution. There are two books in our Top 20 Stock Market Investing Books Review focused on learning Stock Options, “Getting Started In Options” by Michael C. Thomsett & “The Bible of Options Strategies” by Guy Cohen.  Both I consider compulsory reading before you enter the fray.

In addition to these books, read our Top 10 tips for stock options success.

17. Execute your trading plan

Investing is a business, not a hobby. Continual improvement and adaptation are the keys to success.  All of these factors are covered in our Liberated Stock Trader PRO Training.

Class 17. How to Create Your Own Stock Investing & Trading…

18. Analyze stock market direction

The market’s direction will overall dictate the course of your investment.

That is a “FACT.” Although some companies are so large, like Facebook, Intel, Apple & Microsoft, their direction might influence the market’s direction, at least for a short period.

When there is a market collapse, all stocks fall, even the good ones. When there is a rampant bull market, even the worst stocks rise.

Class 3. How Stock Markets Move: Business Cycles & Elliott Waves

So, what is the lesson?

You can use DOW Theory to assess market direction using the major indices. Dow Theory is discussed in depth in the PRO training.  You can even use Ichimoku Cloud Theory to try to predict market direction.

19. Analyze your performance

So you have a system, and it works.  It is always good practice to check, backtest, and continually try to improve it.  But make sure that a change to your system is an improvement and does not increase risk and reduce reward.

Stock backtesting is a process used to test if a set of technical or fundamental criteria for stock selection has previously resulted in profitable trades. A good backtesting system will report executed trades, the trade duration, the win/loss ratio, and the drawdown and compounded return.

For example, if your hypothesis is a stock with a positive RSI number, increasing volume, and an increase in earnings will increase stock price, then a stock backtest will prove if the strategy has worked in the past. The logic here is that if the strategy worked in the past, it might work in the future.

20. Learn to build wealth & compound

A buy and hold investor is a long-term investor who wants to accumulate assets and income over a 10 to 40-year time frame, with the minimum effort. In recent times, Buy & Hold has become unfashionable.

The fact is that buy and hold investors always win over the long-term.

There has never been a 20-year period since 1945 where a buy and hold investor has not made significant gains.

But you are guaranteed to win only if investing in a developed stock market index tracking fund (ITF/ETF), like the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJ20), the S&P 500, or even the higher-performing Nasdaq-100.

This is covered in more depth in the PRO Training.

21. Enjoy life

Who am I to tell you how to enjoy life – no one that’s who.

How you enjoy life is all down to you.  Money is not everything; wealth is a matter of perspective.

You are rich if you have a family that loves you, a dog that loves you, a partner you have a connection with, or even if you have contentment in your heart.

I wish for you to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

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Learn Stock Trading Summary

Learning stock trading and investing takes a lot of work.  There are no shortcuts; you can teach yourself by learning from the wealth of books, videos, podcasts, and training courses available. You must treat you’re investing seriously and not take undue risks with your capital; there are no get-rich-quick schemes.

Now it’s over to you.  Did you like this article? Do you have feedback? What do you think?  Please scroll down and leave a comment to let me know.