You will graduate knowing the quadratic formula and not knowing what a share is, why prices move, or how money grows. That is not an accident of the timetable. A person who understands money is hard to sell to, hard to scare and hard to push around, and nobody built a school system to produce that. So here it is, in eleven short lessons with a picture for each and a quiz to prove you got it. Learn this at fourteen and you walk into adult life with an edge most adults never get. No money is involved anywhere on this page. When you want to try it for real, the whole site lets you practice with paper money on real prices.
One rule for reading them: every lesson ends with something you can check yourself. Do not take our word for it either. A person who checks is the whole point.
Say you and a friend start selling lemonade. You spend $10 on lemons, sugar and cups, and you take in $25 by the end of the day. The $15 left over is profit. That is the whole idea of a company: spend money to make something people want, and try to get more back than you spent.
Apple does exactly what your stand does, just with phones instead of lemonade and billions of dollars instead of ten. Every company in the market, no matter how huge, is a stand that got bigger.
Your stand needs a bigger table but you are out of money. Your cousin gives you $10, and in return you promise her one eighth of every profit, forever. You just sold her a share. Think of the company as a pizza cut into slices. A share is one slice.
Apple is cut into about 15 billion slices. Buy one and you own a real, tiny piece of Apple: a piece of its profits, and a vote at its yearly meeting. That is what "owning stock" means. Stock and share are the same thing.
Your stand gets famous. Now lots of kids want a slice, but there are only eight. They start offering more to get one: $12, $15, $20. The price goes up because more people want to buy than sell. Then it rains for a week. Nobody wants lemonade. Kids holding slices try to sell, nobody is buying, and the price falls.
That is all a price is: a tug of war between buyers and sellers. News, profits, rumors and moods all matter only because they change how many people are pulling on each side. Nobody "sets" the price. The crowd does, every second.
Two words explain almost every price in the world. Supply is how much of something there is. Demand is how many people want it. Lots of demand and little supply, the price rises. Lots of supply and little demand, it falls. A limited-edition sneaker is expensive because supply is tiny. A bottle of water at the beach on a hot day costs $5 because demand is huge.
Stocks work the same way. When a company does something people love, demand for its slices rises and so does the price. When a company sells a lot of new shares, supply rises and the price often dips.
A chart is just the price written down over time, left to right. Each bar (called a candle) is one day. Green means the price ended the day higher than it started. Red means lower. The thin line above and below shows how far it traveled during the day.
Read it like a story. Mostly green and climbing: buyers are winning, the trend is up. Mostly red and sliding: sellers are winning, the trend is down. Mixed and flat: nobody is winning, it is chopping. Grown-up traders spend years on this, but that one paragraph is the heart of it. Everything on this site's charts is built to make that story obvious.
Here is the rule nobody can break: the more money something could make you, the more it could lose you. Anyone who promises big rewards with no risk is lying or selling something.
Picture a ladder. Bottom rung: a savings account, nearly zero risk, tiny reward. Next: a fund that owns hundreds of companies at once, medium risk, has averaged about 10% a year over the last hundred years, with some terrible years mixed in. Next: one single company, higher risk, it can double or go to zero. Top rung: options and other bets, highest risk, can pay many times over or vanish in days. Climbing higher is not smarter. It is riskier, and you should know which rung you are standing on.
Say you have $100. You could put it all into one company. If that company has a bad year, you could lose half. Or you could split it across ten companies in different businesses. If one of them fails, you lose $10, and the other nine carry you. That is diversification, the most boring and most powerful idea in investing.
This is why the fund on lesson 6's ladder exists. One purchase, five hundred companies. For most people, most of the time, it beats picking. Even the traders on this site, who do pick, never put more than a small slice of their account on any one idea. The site literally will not let them.
Put $100 somewhere that grows 8% a year. After one year you have $108. The next year you earn 8% on $108, not $100, so you get $116.64. The growth starts growing. That is compounding, and it is slow at first and then ridiculous.
$100 at 8% becomes about $216 in ten years, $466 in twenty, and about $2,170 in forty. You did nothing. Time did it. Which is why a fifteen-year-old who starts with small amounts can end up ahead of a forty-year-old who starts with big ones. Nobody can give you back the years. Start with what you have, even if it is small.
Your friend thinks lemonade slices, now $10, will be worth more next month. She gives you $1 today for a ticket that says: "I may buy one slice from you for $10 any time this month, if I want to." If slices jump to $15, she uses the ticket, buys at $10, and is up $4 after the ticket cost. If slices drop to $6, she just lets the ticket expire. She lost $1. Not $10.
That ticket is an option. It gives you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell at a set price before a set date. A call is a ticket that wins if the price goes up. A put is a ticket that wins if it goes down. Most of the trade ideas on this site are option trades, because the most you can lose is what you paid for the ticket. That is also the top rung of the ladder: tickets can go to zero fast.
Every twenty years or so, people decide something can only go up. Tulips in 1637. Internet companies in 1999. Houses in 2007. Everyone piles in, prices go crazy, and then one day there is nobody left to buy. The price falls fast. That is a bubble popping, and the drop is a crash.
In 1929 the market lost most of its value. In 2008 it fell by half. In 2020 it fell a third in a month. And every single time, it went on to new highs within a few years. Crashes are not a bug. They are part of the ride. The people who got hurt were the ones who borrowed money to buy, or bet everything on one thing, or panicked and sold at the bottom. The people who were fine had a plan and small enough bets to sleep at night.
Never bet money you cannot afford to lose, and never bet it all on one thing. Some of the smartest people who ever lived lost everything by breaking that rule. The people who last in the market are not the cleverest. They are the ones who always have a plan for being wrong, before they need it.
That is the entire lesson this site teaches adults. Every trade here has an exit decided in advance. No trade can be more than a small slice of the account. And the score you get is for following the plan, not for winning. You just learned in eleven lessons what most people learn by losing money. Do not forget it.
Being young is an advantage (lesson 8), but the rules are different before eighteen. Here is what is real.
For the younger ones, or anyone who wants it explained like they are ten. One idea per lesson, three questions at the end. No money involved, ever.
You open a lemonade stand. Lemons and cups cost $10 and you make $25 selling drinks. The $15 left over is profit. A company is just a giant lemonade stand: it spends money to make something, and hopes to get more back.
Your stand needs a bigger table but you have no money. Your friend gives you $10, and in return you promise her a quarter of every profit forever. You just sold her a share. A share is a slice of the pizza. Companies like Apple are cut into billions of slices, and anyone can buy one.
Your lemonade stand becomes famous. Now lots of kids want a slice, but you only sold four. They start offering more and more to get one. The price goes up because more people want to buy than sell. On a rainy day nobody wants lemonade, kids try to sell their slices, and the price goes down. That is all a price is: a tug of war between buyers and sellers.
Your friend thinks lemonade slices will be worth more next month. She gives you $1 today for a ticket that says: “I can buy a slice for $10 any time this month, if I want to.” If slices go to $15 she uses the ticket and wins. If they drop, she just throws the ticket away and only lost the $1. That ticket is an option. It is a way to bet on where the price is going while only risking the price of the ticket.
Put every lemonade stand, toy shop and phone company in the world in one giant room where people buy and sell slices all day. That room is the stock market. When the news says “the market went up”, it means that, on average, the slices in the room got more expensive today.
Never bet money you cannot afford to lose, and never bet it all on one thing. The smartest people in the market have lost everything by breaking that rule. The people who last are not the cleverest. They are the ones who always have a plan for being wrong. That is what this whole site teaches grown-ups, and you just learned it first.
Everything on this page and this site is for education and practice. Nothing here is financial advice, and nothing here sells anything to anyone under 18. Talk to a parent or guardian before any real account is opened.