Trader Academy
Welcome to the Trader Academy - where learning is earning.
Find out more about Spread Betting, learn the basics of the financial markets and discover some of the best sources of information available on - and off - the internet.
Finding Information
Some traders like to keep life simple and only use a few graphs for their trading. Others want as much information as they can get their hand on. If you fall into the latter category here are some of the tools we Paddy Power traders use and abuse.
Television
CNBC and Bloomberg are the two TV channels we always have on in the office. No cable or satellite TV? Both are also available over the internet, though Bloomberg TV is delayed by a minute or so and CNBC requires a subscription.
News Websites
There are a LOT of news websites out there. However many simply republish stories from the news wires (the wires being the guys that provide news to the newspapers and TV). So, if you prefer to go straight to source, our pick of the wires are Reuters and Bloomberg.
Yahoo! Finance provides news from a few carefully selected sources. It also lets you set up a portfolio of stocks, then monitor news for just those stocks. Google News takes a different approach; it provides news headlines from a massive number of websites and lets you set up a personalised page with the news you want.
For articles with a bit more analysis newspapers and periodicals are your best bet. Of the newspapers, the one we mention most in the blogs (and one of the very few we recommend paying for) is the Financial Times. However if you mainly trade US markets you might prefer the Wall Street Journal (again you'll have to pay). If you often trade shares and want some ideas, Investors Chronicle (for the UK) and Forbes (for the US) might well be worth a peek.
Finally a special mention goes out to the Economist, who have excellent analysis of the bigger picture.
Resource Websites
If there's a term you don't know try paddypowertrader's own Jargon Buster, and if that doesn't work try this Finance Glossary.
For a reference website good old Wikipedia is hard to beat. However Investopedia has a lot of good content too and, if you don't get anywhere with them, give Traderpedia a click.
Regarding education, Babypips has a good set of articles on how to trade Foreign Exchange.
Finally Trade2Win has a well-established set of forums for general chat, asking questions and gleaning pearls from more experienced traders.
Blogroll
Nope, not a bog roll. Blog roll, don't you know, is the trendy term for a list of blogs we are reading (when not writing our own). If you thought there were a lot of news websites, well the number of financial markets blogs makes it look like...
Crossing Wall Street is fun and covers a wide variety of topics, while Slope Of Hope is fun too and geared towards people who like their graphs.
The Financial Times' blog list can be overwhelming but one blogger that guarantees a good read is James Altucher.
For an Irish view on this, that and everything, try A Random Walk.
Oh, and if you want more either try the ones listed in this article or take a look at SeekingAlpha, a collection of (mostly US-based) Financial markets blogs.
Got a suggestion for a website to be included here? Mail suggestions@paddypowertrader.com
More Help
If you haven't seen them yet have a look at our video tutorials. Resident guru Chris P Cash will, in his own inimitable style, give you a brief introduction to spread betting. He'll also cover the basics of how to make a spread bet and walk you through taking short positions and different types of orders.
Once you are up to speed on spread betting you might want to find out a bit more about the financial markets. If so the About The Markets page has links to some of our most informative and amusing blogs. Knowledge and laughs in one place - what more could you want?
Finally don't forget the best way to learn is to practice. The paddypowertrader demo account gives you £10,000 in virtual funds and lets you learn to spread bet without taking risks.