A zero-cost curriculum · Edition 01 · Independently sourced
Everything required to learn this is already free.
The cost of a trading education is not tuition. It is the account you fund before you understand what you are buying. What follows is a four-month curriculum assembled entirely from exchange bodies, clearing houses, regulators and university faculty — every item independently published, none of it selling anything.
Most people will not complete it. They will purchase the shortcut instead, and then pay a second time discovering it was not one.
The premise of this document31
Resources listed
4
Months, sequenced
0
Paid items in the curriculum
0
Affiliate arrangements
00 — Baseline evidence
What the research establishes before you begin
Three datasets, each covering complete populations rather than surveys or self-reported results. They are presented first because they determine how seriously the rest of this page deserves to be taken.
| Finding | Population and result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 97% | Of individuals who day-traded index futures and persisted beyond 300 sessions, 97 per cent lost money. Just 1.1 per cent earned above minimum wage. The authors found no evidence that persistence produced learning. | Chague, De-Losso & Giovannetti — Day Trading for a Living? Brazil, 2020 |
| <1% | Across fifteen years of complete exchange records, fewer than one per cent of day traders could predictably and reliably earn positive returns net of fees. Roughly 80 per cent stopped within two years. | Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean — Journal of Financial Markets. Taiwan, 2014 |
| 74–89% | Retail contract-for-difference accounts losing money across EU jurisdictions. Regulated firms are now obliged to publish their own figure on promotional material. | ESMA and FCA supervisory analysis — Europe & UK, 2018 |
The more consequential finding sits underneath the headline figures. Experience alone did not correct the outcome. Traders did not reliably improve by continuing to trade. Improvement, where the data found it, came from study, position sizing, and keeping a record — which is the entire premise of what follows.
01 — Risk register
How free material is sold back to you
Everything in the curriculum that follows is free. It is placed after this section deliberately, because the principal risk to a beginner is not the market — it is the commercial layer built to intercept them before they ever reach free material. Each pattern below is identifiable before any money moves.
| Pattern | Commercial mechanism | Identifying signal |
|---|---|---|
| Signal groups | A free channel feeds a paid tier. Winning calls are published, losing calls deleted. In 2022 the SEC and Department of Justice charged eight social-media traders operating largely through a trading Discord, in a scheme prosecutors valued near one hundred million dollars. | Results shown, methodology withheld |
| Proprietary firm challenges | Revenue derives from evaluation fees rather than from trading. Where promotion runs on affiliate commission, a participant's failure carries no cost to the promoter. | Paid entry to be allowed to trade |
| Guaranteed or risk-free returns | No such instrument exists in any regulated market. The phrase is definitional rather than exaggerated. | Any use of the word guaranteed |
| Screenshot evidence | Trivially fabricated, trivially selected, never independently audited. A simulator account renders identically to a funded one. | Profit images without statements |
| Broker recommendations | Where one specific broker is insisted upon through a personal link, compensation per funded account should be assumed to have shaped the recommendation. | One broker, one link, no alternatives |
| Withdrawal fees | A demand for tax, release fees or a further deposit before funds can be withdrawn is the oldest pattern in investment fraud. | Payment required to access your own funds |
Credible education teaches a process and publishes its losses. A funnel sells a prediction and publishes a lifestyle.
02 — Month one
Market mechanics and vocabulary
Before strategy, before charts. A material share of retail losses trace to a mechanic nobody explained: a spread, an order type, a margin call, a settlement date.
Foundation
≈ 5 hrs / weekNine modules, no registration, no advertising, no paid tier. Written around Indian markets; the mechanics are universal. The strongest single free curriculum available in any market.
2 weeks
Equities, fixed income, interest, inflation, and a dedicated unit on fraud. Permanently free, non-commercial.
6 hrs
Regulator-published investor education with no commercial interest in whether you trade at all.
2 hrs
Free publications and calculators. The material on margin and on the compounding effect of fees repays the time immediately.
2 hrs
Academic grounding
Optional · high returnAndrew Lo's complete lecture series with slides, problem sets and examinations. Present value, fixed income, equities, forwards, options, portfolio theory.
Full course
Robert Shiller, awarded the Nobel for empirical work on asset prices, lecturing in full and at no cost.
Full course
03 — Month two
Reading a business
A share is a claim on a company's future cash flows. Learn to read the company before learning to read its chart.
Statements, filings, screening
≈ 6 hrs / weekBalance sheet, income statement, cash flow and ratio analysis. The chapter connecting all three statements is the one that changes how everything else reads.
3 weeks
Every filing from every U.S.-listed issuer, free and unmediated. Read the risk factors of one annual report in full. It is an education on its own.
Practice
Over sixty filters and sector heat maps at no cost. Free data carries a delay, which for learning purposes is immaterial.
Tool
Rates, inflation, employment, yield curves. When someone asserts what the macro picture is, verify it here rather than accepting it.
Tool
04 — Month three
Price, structure and position size
Technical analysis is defensible for structure, for placing risk and for timing an entry already justified on other grounds. It is not a prediction engine, and the academic evidence for its predictive power is genuinely mixed. Learn it as a tool, not a doctrine.
Chart reading and risk
≈ 6 hrs / weekCandlestick construction, trend, support and resistance, volume, and a small set of indicators. The restraint is deliberate.
3 weeks
The strongest free charting available. Bar replay allows a setup to be tested against historical data at no risk.
Tool
Free structured courses with no funding requirement. Calculate for yourself what ten consecutive losses do at one per cent risk against five. Doing that arithmetic once tends to be permanent.
Essential
05 — Month four
Derivatives, from the institutions that clear them
The most rigorous options education available anywhere is free, and it is published by clearing houses and exchanges rather than by anyone with a course to sell.
Options and futures
≈ 7 hrs / weekFunded by the Options Clearing Corporation and running since 1992. A nine-course curriculum, live webinars, and a help desk staffed on trading days. Free, unbiased, and more rigorous than most paid programmes.
Essential
Established 1985 as the first dedicated options education body. Free learning paths from introductory to advanced, plus pricing calculators.
Free account
More than sixty self-paced courses covering futures and options mechanics, margin and settlement, with a free simulator. No funded account required.
60+ courses
The Greeks, payoff construction, spreads and multi-leg positions. The theory module is the one most commonly skipped and the one that most often prevents a blown account.
4 weeks
06 — Ongoing
Practice, psychology, and the written record
The studies in section 00 found that repetition alone taught nothing. What distinguished the small group who improved was documentation — a written account of the decision, made before the outcome was known.
Simulation
90 days minimumthinkorswim paperMoney · TradingView paper · Webull paper
All free; none require a funded account. Trade the identical rule set you intend to run live. A simulator cannot reproduce the fear, so assume live results will be measurably worse.
Free
A written journal, every trade without exception
Not the profit and loss. The decision. What the setup was, whether the rule was followed, what was felt at entry, and what would be repeated. Ninety days of that record outperforms ninety courses.
Every trade
Psychology
ContinuousOver a hundred short chapters on trading psychology, free. Read one daily rather than consuming the module at once.
Daily
Public domain; complete text free at Project Gutenberg. A century old and still the most precise account of speculation and self-deception written.
Free text
07 — Behavioural register
The recurring psychological errors
These are not character flaws. Every one is a documented, replicable finding, and every one is invisible from the inside — which is precisely why the written record exists. The third column is the point of the table: each error has a specific journal field that catches it, and none of them can be caught by memory after the fact.
| Error | How it presents at the desk | Caught by |
|---|---|---|
| Disposition effect | Winners are closed early to bank a certain gain; losers are held in the hope of returning to break-even. The most consistently measured error in retail trading, and it inverts the arithmetic a strategy depends on. | Planned exit recorded before entry |
| Overconfidence | Trading frequency rises after a run of wins. The account most active in a given period tends to be the one underperforming the index, because activity is being driven by confidence rather than by opportunity. | Trade count per week, tracked |
| Loss aversion | A loss registers as roughly twice the magnitude of an equivalent gain. The result is stops moved wider in the moment and sizing that quietly expands to make a loss feel recoverable. | Stop location, before and after |
| Revenge trading | A second position is opened immediately after a loss to recover it. Almost never planned, almost always larger, and the single fastest route from a bad day to a bad month. | Minutes elapsed since last close |
| Outcome bias | A profitable trade is judged good and a losing trade bad, regardless of whether the process was followed. This is how a reckless habit gets reinforced by a lucky result and a sound rule gets abandoned after variance. | Rule followed: yes / no — scored separately from profit |
| Anchoring | The entry price becomes the reference point for every subsequent decision. The market has no knowledge of where a position was opened, and a thesis that has broken does not become valid again at break-even. | Written thesis, and what would invalidate it |
| Confirmation bias | Once a position exists, supporting information is sought and contradicting information dismissed. Feeds and communities are then curated, usually unconsciously, into agreement. | The strongest argument against the position, written at entry |
| Sunk cost | Averaging down to justify the original decision rather than because the thesis improved. The capital already committed is treated as a reason to commit more, which is the reverse of the correct inference. | Was adding planned at entry, or improvised |
| Attention-driven entry | Buying whatever is prominent — high volume, breaking news, dominating a feed. Attention determines the shortlist, and the shortlist is where nearly all subsequent risk originates. | Where the idea came from |
| Hindsight bias | After the outcome is known, it feels as though it was foreseeable. This is what quietly destroys the value of reviewing from memory, and why a record written before the outcome is the only usable one. | Conviction level, recorded at entry |
| Recency bias | The last five sessions are weighted as though they represent the market. A strategy is abandoned during an ordinary drawdown and adopted at the end of an ordinary run. | Performance reviewed over 50 trades, not 5 |
| Narrative fallacy | A clean explanatory story is constructed for what was noise. The story is convincing, memorable and unfalsifiable — which is exactly why it survives to inform the next decision. | Distinguishing what was observed from what was inferred |
Nothing in this table is corrected by reading it. Every entry is identified by a record made before the outcome is known — which is why the studies in section 00 found that repetition alone taught nothing while documentation did. The journal is not administration. It is the only instrument that makes any of these visible.
08 — Verification
Confirming any counterparty, at no cost
Every major regulator maintains a free public register and a warning list. Consulting them takes under two minutes and is the single highest-return action on this page.
Public registers
Free · no accountLicensing, employment history and disciplinary record for any registered individual or firm in the United States.
United States
Firms known to be operating in the United Kingdom without authorisation. Consult before depositing rather than after.
United Kingdom
The Commission's own lookup, alongside its standing library of current fraud alerts.
United States
Your own national regulator
SEBI in India, ASIC in Australia, CIRO in Canada, MAS in Singapore, and the national authorities across the EU. Each publishes a free register and a warning list.
All markets