Most trading education starts with charts and skips the machine underneath. This course is the machine: what a stock is, how it trades, and why it moves. Five modules, no prerequisites, and every factual claim anchored to official investor-education sources or the Library's reference pages. It's the first rung of the Fundamentals ladder — valuation, catalysts, and macro all build on it.
I The thing and the machine
Modules 1–3 — ownership, exchanges, orders LIVE
- 1What a stock is — a share as a slice of a real business: ownership, earnings, dividends, and why companies sell shares at all.
- 2How the market machine works — exchanges, brokers, the bid and the ask, and where a "price" actually comes from.
- 3Placing an order — market, limit, and stop orders, from the SEC's own definitions: what each guarantees, and what each gives up.
II The business and the price
Modules 4–5 LIVE
- 4Reading the numbers — the four financial statements, plainly, via the SEC's Beginners' Guide: what a company owns, earns, and actually banks.
- ★The efficiency question — capstone: if prices already reflect everything known, what's left for you? Fama's famous argument, the evidence against it, and what both mean for a beginner.
Sources (credited, verified)
Official investor education: SEC, Beginners' Guide to Financial Statements · Investor.gov, Types of Orders and the Understanding Order Types / Stop Orders bulletins · FINRA Order Types. · Academic anchor: Fama, "Efficient Capital Markets" (J. Finance, 1970) — with the momentum literature from the breakouts course as the counterweight. · Reference layer: the Library's sourced concept pages, linked from each module.