Learning
Learning
An investor's field guide — from first principles to the metrics behind every skill
Learning
An investor’s field guide — the financial and investment concepts behind every InvestSkill framework, explained from first principles. No finance degree required. Read it straight through as a course, or jump to the lesson you need. New to the tools? See Concepts for the mental models and the Glossary for any single term.
Who this is for: anyone who wants to understand why an analysis says what it says — not just read the output. Every skill in InvestSkill computes something an experienced investor would look at. This guide teaches the ideas underneath, so the numbers become decisions.
The learning path
Eight lessons, ordered so each builds on the last. The first six cover everything the plugin measures — from what a share is, to what a business is worth, to how to hold a portfolio without getting hurt — and the last two put it all together on real stocks.
| # | Lesson | What you’ll learn | Related skills |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Investing Foundations | Shares, markets, risk vs. return, compounding, diversification, total return | stock-eval |
| 2 | Reading Financial Statements | Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, free cash flow, red flags | financial-report-analyst, 10k-digest, fundamental-analysis |
| 3 | Judging Business Quality | ROIC vs. WACC, margins, moats, leverage, capital allocation | stock-eval, fundamental-analysis, competitor-analysis, dividend-analysis |
| 4 | Valuation Essentials | Price vs. value, DCF, multiples, comparables, margin of safety | dcf-valuation, stock-valuation |
| 5 | Reading the Market | Technicals, insider & institutional signals, short interest, options, macro & sectors | technical-analysis, insider-trading, institutional-ownership, short-interest, options-analysis, economics-analysis, sector-analysis |
| 6 | Portfolio & Risk | Allocation, position sizing, rebalancing, risk-adjusted return, behavioral pitfalls | portfolio-review, stock-screener, result-validator |
| 7 | The Professional’s Playbook | A worked end-to-end case study on a real stock: plan, research, decision, trading plan, and tracking | all of them |
| 8 | Case Study: AMD | The playbook run end-to-end on AMD — a cyclical AI-semiconductor name, and how the same loop yields a different plan | all of them |
How to use this guide: if you’re brand new, start at Lesson 1 and go in order — later lessons assume the vocabulary from earlier ones. If you already invest, skim the table and jump to the gaps. Lesson 7 is the capstone: it runs the whole process on one company, so read it once you’ve met the ideas in 1–6. Each lesson ends with key takeaways and a link to the next.
The one-paragraph version
A stock is part-ownership of a real business (Lesson 1). To judge that business you read its financial statements (Lesson 2), which tell you whether it’s a high-quality operation earning more than its cost of capital (Lesson 3). Quality alone isn’t enough — you also need to know what it’s worth and to buy with a margin of safety (Lesson 4). The market adds timing and confirmation through price action, positioning, and the macro backdrop (Lesson 5). You hold your ideas inside a portfolio that’s diversified, correctly sized, and protected from your own behavior (Lesson 6). And in the capstones, a professional runs all of it on real stocks — thesis, research plan, valuation, a written trading plan, and ongoing tracking — first on a mature compounder (Lesson 7), then on a cyclical AI-semiconductor name, AMD (Lesson 8).
How the lessons map to InvestSkill
InvestSkill is a set of educational analysis frameworks (“skills”) that turn any AI assistant into a structured investment analyst. This guide teaches the concepts; the skills apply them to a real ticker and end each analysis in a plain-English signal block (direction, confidence, horizon, action, conviction — decoded in Concepts).
- Want to do an analysis? See Choose a Skill to map your goal to the right framework.
- Want the mental models the skills encode? See Concepts.
- Want a term defined fast? See the Glossary.
- Want to see it end-to-end? See Use Cases.
Start here: Investing Foundations →
Educational content only. Not financial advice.