Starting from zero · Course 1 of 11 · Before anything else
Investing from zero
What a share is, how a trade happens, where returns come from, and the index-fund baseline every stock picker has to beat.
For a reader who has never bought a share and wants to start from what one actually is. No earlier course is assumed.
After it you can say what a share is a claim on and where it sits behind a company's other claims, follow one order from a broker through to a settled trade, and split a year's return into its dividend, its earnings growth and its change in price multiple. You can tell a falling price apart from money actually lost, and name the return a low-cost index fund sets as the bar any other approach has to clear. You can also name the costs, a fee, a spread, and a tax, that come out of a return before you get to count it.
Vocabulary, not a verdict
Investing from zero is 7 lessons on what the words mean and how the mechanics behind them work: what you own, how a trade happens, what it costs you. That is the floor rather than the answer. This course cannot tell you whether anything you already own is worth holding, because it has read no filing of yours.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.