Markets & Investing

What each instrument actually is, who issues it, why it exists, and what owning it entitles you to. Equity is ownership, debt is a promise, an ETF is a wrapper, an option is a right.

What school skips: How these trade in practice: tickers, exchanges vs OTC, why an ETF can trade away from its NAV, and what "the market" (SPY, the S&P 500) actually refers to.

Learn: Investopedia: Stock Basics · Bogleheads wiki: ETFs

How a trade actually happens: bids, asks, spreads, market vs limit vs stop orders, and why the order type you choose changes the price you get.

What school skips: Slippage and liquidity. Textbooks assume you trade at "the price." Real fills depend on size, spread, and urgency, and bad order discipline quietly costs real money.

Learn: Investopedia: Order Types

Candles, volume, moving averages, and volatility as a concept: what a chart can tell you (behavior, ranges, regime shifts) and what it cannot (the future, by itself).

What school skips: That volatility is the cost of admission, not a defect. Most curricula treat variance as a statistic; traders experience it as drawdowns that test whether you keep your process.

Learn: StockCharts ChartSchool

Why interest rates are the gravity of asset prices: discount rates, the yield curve, what the Fed controls (short rates) and what it only influences (everything else).

What school skips: The transmission lag. Policy hits the economy in quarters, not days, and markets price the expectation, not the announcement. "Buy the rumor, sell the news" is a discounting lesson, not a slogan.

Learn: Fed education: monetary policy · Investopedia: Yield Curve

Markets move in persistent moods. The same strategy that prints in 2013 dies in 2008. Regime awareness is knowing which playbook the moment calls for.

What school skips: That you never know the regime with certainty in real time. Every backtest knows 2008 was a crisis; nobody trading January 2008 did. Decision-making under regime uncertainty IS the skill.

Learn: Investopedia: Market Cycles

The dot-com bust, the GFC, the COVID crash, and the 2022 rate shock: what broke, how policy responded, how long recovery took, and which behaviors survived each.

What school skips: How different the crises felt from inside. 2008 was slow-motion dread over 15 months; 2020 was a 33% drop in 23 trading days and a violent V. Speed changes what discipline means.

Learn: Federal Reserve History: essays

Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, and the ratios that compress them (margins, ROIC, leverage). Valuation as a discipline: multiples, DCF logic, and what "priced in" means.

What school skips: That valuation is a range, not an answer. Two honest analysts can be 40% apart on fair value. The skill is knowing which assumptions your thesis lives or dies on.

Learn: SEC: How to Read a 10-K · Damodaran: valuation lectures (free)

Every position needs a falsifiable reason: what you believe, why the market disagrees, what would prove you wrong, and when you exit. A thesis is a pre-commitment, not a vibe.

What school skips: The post-mortem habit. Reviewing why a trade worked or failed against its original thesis is where actual learning happens, and almost nobody teaches it as a practice.

Learn: Howard Marks memos (Oaktree)

How much to bet is a different question from what to buy, and usually matters more. Sizing to survive being wrong: max position rules, correlation between positions, why 10 uncorrelated ideas beat 2 favorites.

What school skips: That ruin is asymmetric. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to recover. Sizing discipline is not conservatism, it is arithmetic.

Learn: Investopedia: Position Sizing

Return is the headline; risk-adjusted return is the truth. Sharpe (return per unit of volatility), max drawdown (the worst stretch you actually lived through), alpha (what you added vs simply holding the market).

What school skips: That professionals are hired and fired on these, not on returns. +30% with a 40% drawdown is a worse record than +12% smooth, and every allocator knows it.

Learn: Investopedia: Sharpe Ratio · Investopedia: Alpha

Loss aversion, recency bias, revenge trading, overconfidence after wins. The market converts emotion into other people’s returns unless you build process against it.

What school skips: That knowing the biases does not immunize you. Only process does: pre-committed theses, sizing rules, and reviewing your own decision log like film.

Learn: Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (book)

Volume of honest practice. Trade multiple hidden regimes in sandbox mode, write theses, review the reveal each time: were you reading the market or telling yourself stories?

What school skips: Deliberate practice with feedback loops. A semester-long portfolio project with no scoring teaches almost nothing; twenty scored runs with reveals teach pattern recognition.

Runs scored server-side on hidden markets, with every trade and thesis recorded. Return, Sharpe, alpha, drawdown: computed, timestamped, and verifiable by anyone with the link.

What school skips: A credential that is checkable. Clubs and classes hand out titles; recruiters discount all of them because none can be verified. A number that cannot be faked is different in kind.

Anyone can look smart in 2013. Certify a run through a crisis-grade regime and let the record show how you handled a market that was actively trying to hurt you.

What school skips: That capital preservation IS performance. Flat through 2020 with a 1.3 Sharpe is a story every allocator respects more than +40% in a melt-up.

Every entrant trades the same hidden market with a $1M book, one attempt, Sharpe-ranked. Divisions for individuals, clubs, and schools. A placement is a resume line the way dean’s list is, with proof attached.

What school skips: Ranked competition under identical conditions. School competitions run on live markets where luck and news-reading dominate; a shared hidden market isolates decision skill.