Recommended education path for a future individual investor?
"For a job doing that kind of stuff, what is PREFERRED is 4 year undergrad at ivy league school + 2 year MBA at ivy league school, and then several more years of experience, which you can sort of get by interning while in school this will of course saddle you with debt, which is counterintuitive to your plans basically, the easy way up is percentage based compensation. without knowing the right people, you will get a piss poor salary regardless of what you do, in the beginning. so portfolio managers earn money by percentage based fees, and can manage millions and billions. real estate agents can earn money by percentage based commissions if they close a property and other business venture/owners can do the same thing. the problem with ""how to trade"" books is that they are outdated by the time they are published. so you should just stick with literature that teaches a fundamental knowledge of the products you want to trade/make money from. ultimately regardless of how you get/earn your initial capital, you will still need to be an individual investor to grow your own capital. this has nothing to do with being a portfolio manager, even highly paid individuals on wall street are in debt to lavish expenditures and have zero capital for their own investments. hope this helps, you really need to be thinking in a certain way to just quickly deduce good ideas from bad ideas" My plan is that one day I can become free of the modern day monetary burdens that most adults carry with them and I can enjoy a short life without these troubles on my mind. If your objective is to achieve financial independence, and to be able to retire early from the workforce, that's a path that has been explored before. So there's plenty of sources that you might want to check.  The good news is that you don't need to be an expert on security analysis or go through dozens of text books to invest wisely and enjoy the market returns. This is the Bogleheads philosophy. It's widely accepted by people in academia, and thoroughly tested. Look into it further if you want to see the rationale behind, but, to sum it up: It doesn't matter how expert you are. The idea of beating the market, that an index fund tracks, is about 'outsmarting' the rest of investors. That would be difficult, even if it was a matter of skill, but when it comes to predicting random events we're all equally clueless.  *Total Expense Ratio: It gives an idea of how expensive is a given fund in terms of fees. Actively managed funds have higher TER than indexed ones. This doesn't mean there aren't index funds with, unexplainable, high TER out there. It depends on whether you want a career as a fund manager/ analyst or if you want to be an investor/ trader. A fund manager will have many constraints that a private investor doesn’t have, as they are managing other people’s money.  If they do invest their own money as well they usually would invest it differently from how they invest the fund's money. Many would just get someone else to invest their money for them, just as a surgeon would get another surgeon to operate on a family member. My suggestion to you is to find a job you like doing and build up your savings. Whilst you are building up your savings read some books. You said you don’t know much about the financial markets, then learn about them. Get yourself a working knowledge about both fundamental and technical analysis. Work out which method of analysis (if not both) suits you best and you would like to know more about. As you read you will get a better idea if you prefer to be a long term investor or a short term trader or somewhere in-between or a combination of various methods. Now you will start to get an idea of what type of books and areas of analysis you would like to concentrate on. Once you have a better idea of what you would like to do and have gained some knowledge, then you can develop your investment/trading plan and start paper trading. Once you are happy with you plan and your paper trading you can start trading with a small account balance (not more than $10,000 and preferably under $5,000). No matter how well you did with paper trading you will always do worse with real money at first due to your emotions being in it now. So always start off small. If you want to become good at something it takes time and a lot of hard work. You can’t go from knowing nothing to making a million dollars per year without putting in the hard yards first.
"Fool's 13 steps to invest is a good starting point. Specifically, IFF all your credit cards are paid, and you made sure you've got no outstanding liabilities (that also accrues interest), stock indexes might be a good place for 5-10 years timeframes. For grad school, I'd probably look into cash ISA (or local equivalent thereof) -the rate of return is going to be lower, but having it in a separate account at least makes it mentally ""out of sight - out of mind"", so you can make sure the money's there WHEN you need it." https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/most-important-finance-books-2017-1  Bloomberg, finacial times, chat with traders, calculated risk, reuters, wsj, cnbc(sucks), bnn (if canadian)  Audio books on youtube helped me read a lot of finance books in a short amount of time, listen while working out.  One thing that helped me stand out at my student terms (4th year here) was learning outside of the classroom and joining an investment club. Learning programming can help if thats a strength, but its really not needed and  it can waste time if yoi wont reach a point to build tools.  Other than that at 18 you have more direction than i did, good luck! There are all sorts of topics in finance that take a lot of time to learn.  You have valuation (time value of money, capital asset pricing model, dividend discount model, etc.), financial statement analysis (ratio analysis, free cash flow &amp; discounted cash flow, etc.) , capital structure analysis(Modgliani &amp; Miller theories of capital structure, weighted average cost of capital, more CAPM, the likes), and portfolio management (asset allocation, security selection, integrates financial statement analysis + other fields like derivatives, fixed income, forex, and commodity markets) and all sorts.   My opinion of Investopedia is that there is a lot of wheat with the chaff.  I think articles/entries are just user-submitted and there are good gems in Investopedia but a lot of it only covers very basic concepts.  And you often don't know what you don't know, so you might come out with a weak understanding of something.    To begin, you need to understand TVM and why it works.  Time value of money is a critical concept of finance that I feel many people don't truly grasp and just understand you need some 'rate' to use for this formula.  Also, as a prereq, you should understand basics of accrual accounting (debits &amp; credits) and how the accounting system works.  Don't need to know things like asset retirement obligations, or anything fancy, just how accounting works and how things affect certain financial statements.  After that, I'd jump into CAPM and cost of capital.  Cost of capital is also a very misunderstood concept since schools often just give students the 'cost of capital' for math problems when in reality, it's not just an explicit number but more of a 'general feeling' in the environment.  Calculating cost of capital is actually often very tricky (market risk premium) and subjective, sometimes it's not (LIBOR based).    After that, you can build up on those basic concepts and start to do things like dividend discount models (basic theory underlying asset pricing models) and capital asset pricing models, which builds on the idea of cost of capital.    Then go into valuation.  Learn how to price equities, bonds, derivatives, etc.  For example, you have the dividend discount model with typical equities and perpetuities.  Fixed income has things like duration &amp; convexity to measure risk and analyze yield curves.  Derivatives, you have the Black-Scholes model and other 'derivatives' (heh) of that formula for calculating prices of options, futures, CDOs, etc.  Valuation is essentially taking the idea of TVM to the next logical step.  Then you can start delving into financial modelling.  Free cash flows, discounted cash flows, ratio analysis, pro forma projections.  Start small, use a structured problem that gives you some inputs and just do calculations.  Bonuses* would be ideas of capital structure (really not necessary for entry level positions) like the M&amp;M theorems on capital structure (debt vs equity), portfolio management (risk management, asset allocation, hedging, investment strategies like straddles, inverse floaters, etc), and knowledge of financial institutions and banking regulations (Basel accords, depository regulations, the Fed, etc.).    Once you gain an understanding of how this works, pick something out there and do a report on it.  Then you'll be left with a single 'word problem' that gives you nothing except a problem and tells you to find an answer.  You'll have to find all the inputs and give reasons why these inputs are sound and reasonable inputs for this analysis.    A big part that people don't understand about projections and analysis is that **inputs don't exist in plain sight**.  You have to make a lot of judgment calls when making these assumptions and it takes a lot of technical understanding to make a reasonable assumption--of which the results of your report highly depend on.  As a finance student, you get a taste for all of this.  I'm gonna say it's going to be hard to learn a lot of substantial info in 2 months, but I'm not exactly sure what big business expects out of their grunts.  You'll mostly be doing practical work like desk jockey business, data entry, and other labor-based jobs.  If you know what you're talking about, you can probably work up to something more specialized like underwriting or risk management or something else.   Source:  Finance degree but currently working towards starting a (finance related) company to draw on my programming background as well. "(Since you used the dollar sign without any qualification, I assume you're in the United States and talking about US dollars.) You have a few options here. I won't make a specific recommendation, but will present some options and hopefully useful information. Here's the short story: To buy individual stocks, you need to go through a broker. These brokers charge a fee for every transaction, usually in the neighborhood of $7. Since you probably won't want to just buy and hold a single stock for 15 years, the fees are probably unreasonable for you. If you want the educational experience of picking stocks and managing a portfolio, I suggest not using real money. Most mutual funds have minimum investments on the order of a few thousand dollars. If you shop around, there are mutual funds that may work for you. In general, look for a fund that: An example of a fund that meets these requirements is SWPPX from Charles Schwabb, which tracks the S&P 500. Buy the product directly from the mutual fund company: if you go through a broker or financial manager they'll try to rip you off. The main advantage of such a mutual fund is that it will probably make your daughter significantly more money over the next 15 years than the safer options. The tradeoff is that you have to be prepared to accept the volatility of the stock market and the possibility that your daughter might lose money. Your daughter can buy savings bonds through the US Treasury's TreasuryDirect website. There are two relevant varieties: You and your daughter seem to be the intended customers of these products: they are available in low denominations and they guarantee a rate for up to 30 years. The Series I bonds are the only product I know of that's guaranteed to keep pace with inflation until redeemed at an unknown time many years in the future. It is probably not a big concern for your daughter in these amounts, but the interest on these bonds is exempt from state taxes in all cases, and is exempt from Federal taxes if you use them for education expenses. The main weakness of these bonds is probably that they're too safe. You can get better returns by taking some risk, and some risk is probably acceptable in your situation. Savings accounts, including so-called ""money market accounts"" from banks are a possibility. They are very convenient, but you might have to shop around for one that: I don't have any particular insight into whether these are likely to outperform or be outperformed by treasury bonds. Remember, however, that the interest rates are not guaranteed over the long run, and that money lost to inflation is significant over 15 years. Certificates of deposit are what a bank wants you to do in your situation: you hand your money to the bank, and they guarantee a rate for some number of months or years. You pay a penalty if you want the money sooner. The longest terms I've typically seen are 5 years, but there may be longer terms available if you shop around. You can probably get better rates on CDs than you can through a savings account. The rates are not guaranteed in the long run, since the terms won't last 15 years and you'll have to get new CDs as your old ones mature. Again, I don't have any particular insight on whether these are likely to keep up with inflation or how performance will compare to treasury bonds. Watch out for the same things that affect savings accounts, in particular fees and reduced rates for balances of your size." 2 + 20 isn't really a investment style, more of a management style.  As CTA I don't have specific experience in the Hedge Fund industry but they are similar.   For tech stuff, you may want to check out Interactive Brokers.   As for legal stuff, with a CTA you need to have power of attorney form, disclosure documents, risk documents, fees, performance, etc. You basically want to cover your butt and make sure clients understand everything.   For regulatory compliance and rules, you would have to consult your apporiate regulatory body. For a CTA its the NFA/CFTC. You should look at getting licensed to provide crediabilty. For a CTA it would be the series 3 license at the very least and I can provide you with a resource for study guides and practice test taking for ALL licenses.   I can provide a brief step by step guide later on. I like Keshlam's answer and would like to add a few notes: While your enthusiasm to invest is admirable learning patience is a key aspect of wealth building and keeping. "This may be a great idea, or a very bad one, or it may simply not be applicable to you, depending on your personal circumstances and interests. The general idea is to avoid passive investments such as stocks and bonds, because they tend to grow by ""only"" a few percent per year. Instead, invest in things where you will be actively involved in some form. With those, much higher investment returns are common (but also the risk is higher, and you may be tied down and have to limit the traveling you want to do). So here are a few different ways to do that: Get a college degree, but only if you are interested in the field, and it ends up paying you well. If you aren't interested in the field, you won't land the $100k+ jobs later. And if you study early-childhood education, you may love the job, but it won't pay enough to make it a good investment. Of course, it also has to fit with your life plans, but that might be easier than it seems. You want to travel. Have you thought about anthropology, marine biology or archeology? Pick a reputable, hard-to-get-into, academic school rather than a vocation-oriented oe, and make sure that they have at least some research program. That's one way to distinguish between the for-profit schools (who tend to be very expensive and land you in low-paying jobs), and schools that actually lead to a well-paying future. Or if your interest runs more in a different direction: start a business. Your best bet might be to buy a franchise. Many of the fast-food chains, such as McDonalds, will let you buy as long as you have around $300k net worth. Most franchises also require that you are qualified. It may often make sense to buy not just one franchised store, but several in an area. You can increase your income (and your risk) by getting a loan - you can probably buy at least $5 million worth of franchises with your ""seed money"". BTW, I'm only using McDonalds as an example. Well-known fast food franchises used to be money-making machines, but their popularity may well have peaked. There are franchises in all kinds of industries, though. Some tend to be very short-term (there is a franchise based on selling customer's stuff on ebay), while others can be very long-lived (many real-estate brokerages are actually franchises). Do be careful which ones you buy. Some can be a ""license to print money"" while others may fail, and there are some fraudsters in the franchising market, out to separate you from your money. Advantage over investing in stocks and bonds: if you choose well, your return on investment can be much higher. That's generally true for any business that you get personally involved in. If you do well, you may well end up retiring a multimillionaire. Drawback: you will be exposed to considerable risk. The investment will be a major chunk of your net worth, and you may have to put all your eggs in none basket. If your business fails, you may lose everything. A third option (but only if you have a real interest in it!): get a commercial driver's license and buy an 18-wheeler truck. I hear that owner-operators can easily make well over $100k, and that's with having to pay off a bank loan. But if you don't love trucker culture, it is likely not worth doing. Overall, you probably get the idea: the principle is to use your funds as seed money to launch something profitable and secure, as well as enjoyable for you." "I tell you how I started as an investor: read the writings of probably the best investor of the history and become familiarized with it: Warren Buffett. I highly recommend ""The Essays of Warren Buffett"", where he provides a wise insight on how a company generates value, and his investment philosophy. You won't regret it! And also, specially in finance, don't follow the advice from people that you don't know, like me." "As foundational material, read ""The Intelligent Investor"" by Benjamin Graham.  It will help prepare you to digest and critically evaluate other investing advice as you form your strategy." If you want to invest in stocks, bonds and mutual funds I would suggest you take a portion of your inheritance and use it to learn how to invest in this asset class wisely. Take courses on investing and trading (two different things) in paper assets and start trading on a fantasy exchange to test and hone your investment skills before risking any of your money. Personally I don't find bonds to have a meaningful rate of return and I prefer stocks that have a dividend over those that don't. Parking some of your money in an IRA is a good strategy for when you do not see opportunities to purchase cashflow-positive assets right away; this allows you to wait and deploy your capital when the opportunity presents itself and to educate yourself on what a good opportunity looks like. "There's several approaches to the stock market. The first thing you need to do is decide which you're going to take. The first is the case of the standard investor saving money for retirement (or some other long-term goal). He already has a job. He's not really interested in another job. He doesn't want to spend thousands of hours doing research. He should buy mutual funds or similar instruments to build diversified holdings all over the world. He's going to have is money invested for years at a time. He won't earn spectacular amazing awesome returns, but he'll earn solid returns. There will be a few years when he loses money, but he'll recover it just by waiting. The second is the case of the day trader. He attempts to understand ultra-short-term movements in stock prices due to news, rumors, and other things which stem from quirks of the market and the people who trade in it. He buys a stock, and when it's up a fraction of a percent half an hour later, sells it. This is very risky, requires a lot of attention and a good amount of money to work with, and you can lose a lot of money too. The modern day-trader also needs to compete with the ""high-frequency trading"" desks of Wall Street firms, with super-optimized computer networks located a block away from the exchange so that they can make orders faster than the guy two blocks away. I don't recommend this approach at all. The third case is the guy who wants to beat the market. He's got long-term aspirations and vision, but he does a lot more research into individual companies, figures out which are worth buying and which are not, and invests accordingly. (This is how Warren Buffett made it big.) You can make it work, but it's like starting a business: it's a ton of work, requires a good amount of money to get going, and you still risk losing lots of it.  The fourth case is the guy who mostly invests in broad market indexes like #1, but has a little money set aside for the stocks he's researched and likes enough to invest in like #3. He's not going to make money like Warren Buffett, but he may get a little bit of an edge on the rest of the market. If he doesn't, and ends up losing money there instead, the rest of his stocks are still chugging along. The last and stupidest way is to treat it all like magic, buying things without understanding them or a clear plan of what you're going to do with them. You risk losing all your money. (You also risk having it stagnate.) Good to see you want to avoid it. :)" Investopedia does have tutorials about investments in different asset classes. Have you read them ? If you had heard of CFA, you can read their material if you can get hold of it or register for CFA. Their material is quite extensive and primarily designed for newbies.  This  is one helluva book and advice coming from persons who have showed and proved their tricks. And the good part is loads of advice in one single volume. And what they would suggest is probably opposite of what you would be doing in a hedge fund. And you can always trust google to fish out resources at the click of a button. "Great question! While investing in individual stocks can be very useful as a learning experience, my opinion is that concentrating an entire portfolio in a few companies' stock is a mistake for most investors, and especially for a novice for several reasons. After all, only a handful of professional investors have ever beaten the market over the long term by picking stocks, so is it really worth trying? If you could, I'd say go work on Wall Street and good luck to you. Diversification For many investors, diversification is an important reason to use an ETF or index fund. If they were to focus on a few sectors or companies, it is more likely that they would have a lop-sided risk profile and might be subject to a larger downside risk potential than the market as a whole, i.e. ""don't put all your eggs in one basket"". Diversification is important because of the nature of compound investing - if you take a significant hit, it will take you a long time to recover because all of your future gains are building off of a smaller base. This is one reason that younger investors often take a larger position in equities, as they have longer to recover from significant market declines. While it is very possible to build a balanced, diversified portfolio from individual stocks, this isn't something I'd recommend for a new investor and would require a substantial college-level understanding of investments, and in any case, this portfolio would have a more discrete efficient frontier than the market as a whole. Lower Volatility Picking individual stocks or sectors would could also significantly increase or decrease the overall volatility of the portfolio relative to the market, especially if the stocks are highly cyclical or correlated to the same market factors. So if they are buying tech stocks, they might see bigger upswings and downswings compared to the market as a whole, or see the opposite effect in the case of utilities. In other words, owning a basket of individual stocks may result in an unintended volatility/beta profile. Lower Trading Costs and Taxes Investors who buy individual stocks tend to trade more in an attempt to beat the market. After accounting for commission fees, transaction costs (bid/ask spread), and taxes, most individual investors get only a fraction of the market average return. One famous academic study finds that investors who trade more trail the stock market more. Trading also tends to incur higher taxes since short term gains (<1 year) are taxed at marginal income tax rates that are higher than long term capital gains. Investors tend to trade due to behavioral failures such as trying to time the market, being overconfident, speculating on stocks instead of long-term investing, following what everyone else is doing, and getting in and out of the market as a result of an emotional reaction to volatility (ie buying when stocks are high/rising and selling when they are low/falling). Investing in index funds can involve minimal fees and discourages behavior that causes investors to incur excessive trading costs. This can make a big difference over the long run as extra costs and taxes compound significantly over time. It's Hard to Beat the Market since Markets are Quite Efficient Another reason to use funds is that it is reasonable to assume that at any point in time, the market does a fairly good job of pricing securities based on all known information. In other words, if a given stock is trading at a low P/E relative to the market, the market as a whole has decided that there is good reason for this valuation. This idea is based on the assumption that there are already so many professional analysts and traders looking for arbitrage opportunities that few such opportunities exist, and where they do exist, persist for only a short time. If you accept this theory generally (obviously, the market is not perfect), there is very little in the way of insight on pricing that the average novice investor could provide given limited knowledge of the markets and only a few hours of research. It might be more likely that opportunities identified by the novice would reflect omissions of relevant information. Trying to make money in this way then becomes a bet that other informed, professional investors are wrong and you are right (options traders, for example). Prices are Unpredictable (Behave Like ""Random"" Walks) If you want to make money as a long-term investor/owner rather than a speculator/trader, than most of the future change in asset prices will be a result of future events and information that is not yet known. Since no one knows how the world will change or who will be tomorrow's winners or losers, much less in 30 years, this is sometimes referred to as a ""random walk."" You can point to fundamental analysis and say ""X company has great free cash flow, so I will invest in them"", but ultimately, the problem with this type of analysis is that everyone else has already done it too. For example, Warren Buffett famously already knows the price at which he'd buy every company he's interested in buying. When everyone else can do the same analysis as you, the price already reflects the market's take on that public information (Efficent Market theory), and what is left is the unknown (I wouldn't use the term ""random""). Overall, I think there is simply a very large potential for an individual investor to make a few mistakes with individual stocks over 20+ years that will really cost a lot, and I think most investors want a balance of risk and return versus the largest possible return, and don't have an interest in developing a professional knowledge of stocks. I think a better strategy for most investors is to share in the future profits of companies buy holding a well-diversified portfolio for the long term and to avoid making a large number of decisions about which stocks to own." Probably marketing if the degree is of high quality. Marketing is a the bottleneck  of many businesses.   But there are at least some things about entrepreneurship he should learn, like customer development by steve blank.  But i actually think instead of learning, trying hard to think of a good business , and succeeding in getting into a good accelerator, like y-combinator, is the best education for funding a growth startup. If it's money you can lose, and you're young, why not?  Another would be motifinvesting where you can invest in ideas as opposed to picking companies. However, blindly following other investors is not a good idea.  Big investors strategies might not be similar to yours, they might be looking for something different than you.  If you're going to do that, find someone with similar goals. Having investments, and a strategy, that you believe in and understand is paramount to investing.  It's that belief, strategy, and understanding that will give you direction.  Otherwise you're just going to follow the herd and as they say, sheep get slaughtered.