10 Great Ways to Learn Stock Trading in 2021

1. Open a stock broker account
2. Read books
3. Read articles
4. Find a mentor or a friend to learn with
5. Study successful investors
6. Read and casually follow the stock market
7. Carefully consider paid subscriptions
8. Cautiously explore seminars, online courses, or live classes
9. Buy your first shares of stock or practice trading through a simulator
10. Follow Warren Buffett’s advice, buy and hold the market

What is the Stock Market?
The stock market is built around the simple concept of connecting buyers and sellers who wish to trade shares of publicly traded companies. It is a marketplace.

Each publicly traded company lists their shares on a stock exchange. The two largest exchanges in the world are the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the NASDAQ; both are based in the United States (Wikipedia). Attempting to grasp just how large the NYSE and NASDAQ both are is certainly not easy. The NYSE has a market cap of nearly $31 trillion and the NASDAQ’s is nearly $11 trillion. And yes, that is not a typo, I said, “trillion”.

Let’s take Apple (AAPL) for example, which is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Apple currently has 4.6 billion shares outstanding, of which 4.35 billion are available to be traded (also known as the “float”). Using today’s closing price of $201.75 (July 11th, 2019), Apple has a market cap of $937.44 billion. That’s a big company! (By the way, market cap is a simple way to gauge the value of a company. If you bought every available share of stock, the market cap is how much it would cost you to buy the entire company.)

More recently, in May 2019, Uber (UBER) went public, listing its shares on the NYSE. As of today’s close, UBER’s stock trades for $43.99 per share and the company boasts a market cap of $74.59 billion.

Once a company has their shares listed on an exchange, then anyone, including you and I, can use an online broker account to trade shares. Whether you are an everyday investor or an institutional hedge fund managing hundreds of millions of dollars in client money, anyone can trade.