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These days, you can learn anything on the internet.
From coding, cooking, painting, and self-help skills, there’s a course for everything — even how to be a millionaire through investing.
Or so they claim.
Investing in the stock market is a great strategy to grow your wealth, and investing courses can give you the knowledge you need to start investing properly and avoid costly mistakes. But with so many courses from self-proclaimed “experts,” how do you know which ones are worth your money?
Here’s what to look for in an investing course and what to know before you sign up.
Investing courses, as the name suggests, are courses that teach you how to invest in the stock market smartly and strategically. Typical topics covered by investing courses include:
There are many types of investing courses geared toward different audiences, each with its own features and price points. Here is a breakdown of the details:
Be wary of any course that promises immediate gains or guaranteed earnings. Smart investing is inherently a long-term game that seeks to reduce, not erase, your risk.
A good course that teaches you how to invest your money properly can pay dividends for years to come.
“It’s so important to invest your money into understanding how to build wealth for the next thirty, forty years of your life,” says Tori Dunlap, founder of Her First $100K, an online money and career platform for millenial women. “This information you will use for decades of your life. And it’s important that you do it right and that you do it correctly.”
While you can learn on your own using the plentiful and freely available information on the internet, a course can compile all the content you need to know in one place for quicker and easier learning. And it can also teach you things you didn’t know you didn’t know, says Dominique Broadway, founder of the financial advice platform Finances De·mys·ti·fied. “You can Google everything, but if you don’t know what to Google, it doesn’t work,” she says. You have to be aware that an investing strategy or product exists in order to Google it.
Ultimately, whether or not an investing course is worth it depends on what you can do with the information learned and whether you want to save the time and hassle of doing your own research. “It depends on what type of learner you are,” says Rebecka Zavaleta, creator of the investing community First Milli. “Have an honest conversation with yourself about what has worked out for you and what has not.” Some learners need community and accountability. If that is what you need and a particular investing course offers that, it will be worth it, continued Zavaleta.
But like investing itself, don’t spend money you can’t afford, and make sure a course is legitimate before you pay anything. It can be a good idea for beginners to learn the basics with free or low-cost courses before shelling out money for advanced lessons.
With a ton of products to choose from, we did some research and listed our picks for the best investing courses available in 2021.
Beginner-friendly introduction to investing
Cost: $29 (free with a $39/month CreativeLive subscription)
This course, offered by NextAdvisor contributor Erin Lowry, author of the “Broke Millennial” book series, includes 12 videos covering topics like compound interest, setting financial goals, stock market basics, and picking initial investments. With a great overview of investing basics and a relatively low price tag, this course is perfect for beginners who are just starting out.
A guide to investing for FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)
Cost: $37 for the bundle, $27 and $17 for course 1 and 2, respectively, when sold separately
Another NextAdvisor contributor and host of NextAdvisor’s Latina Women on FIRE event, Jannese Torres-Rodriguez, nationally-acclaimed Latina money expert, podcaster, educator, speaker, writer, and business/wealth coach, uses investing as a way to achieve financial independence. Her course aims to teach you how to do the same. The first course, Master The Market 101: Investing For Beginners, covers the basics of investing, while the second, Master The Market 102: Investing For Financial Independence, teaches you about the FIRE movement and how investing can help you achieve financial independence. Torres-Rodriguez also runs the free popular podcast Yo Quiero Dinero, where she offers financial advice tailored to the Latinx community and people of color.
Popular and highly-reviewed
Cost: Available with a SkillShare Premium Membership ($32/month or $168 a year, with a seven-day free trial available)
This two-part course, created by the popular YouTube channel Business Casual, is one of the most popular and highly-rated introductory investing courses on the online learning platform SkillShare, with over 55,000 students and 2,100 reviews between the two parts. Part one teaches stock market basics like what are stocks and index funds, while part two covers more advanced topics like dividends and buybacks. The course includes videos and interactive projects to help you put the knowledge you learned into practice. The course is only accessible with a SkillShare Premium, which gives you unlimited access to all the courses on the platform.
Fun, bite-sized lessons
Wealthsimple’s free video series offers quick, accessible, and entertaining lessons in the form of ten videos that will give you a rundown of investing basics in under an hour. The concepts are broken down into easy-to-understand terms and come packaged with fun graphics and a witty presentation by Emmy-nominated actor Nicholas Braun. These videos are free and publicly accessible from Wealthsimple’s website, meaning there’s no need to give out your email or sign up for any programs or products.
Non-video lessons from beginner to advanced
If you prefer reading to watching videos, Merrill Edge offers a large collection of textbook-style modules with topics ranging from the basic (Stocks 101: Stocks versus Other Investments) to the advanced (Stocks 402: Introduction to Using Ratios and Multiples) and everything in between. Each module also includes a short quiz to help check your knowledge. In addition to lessons about stocks, you can also learn about funds, bonds, EFTs, and portfolios. The content is drawn directly from Morningstar’s free investing classroom, but you don’t need to sign up for an account if you go through Merrill Edge’s page.
These may not be full courses in the traditional sense, but they’re still great resources to learn about investing on your own:
Charging for online courses and content has become an easy way for many to make money, so it’s important to vet your choice carefully, says Zavaleta. Here are some things to consider when choosing an investing course, whether free or paid:
For our list of best paid and free investing courses, we handpicked courses from independent creators, courses on a larger learning platform, and courses offered by companies or organizations. We looked at several factors when choosing these courses: affordability; customer reviews; the expertise of the course creators, based on their credentials and reputation; and the unique value each course offered, based on its content. All research was gathered independently from information publicly available on the course pages, without vetting from the course creators. Our analysis is not influenced by any affiliate or advertising relationships.
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