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Free Investing Course from Scratch, in Plain English
Thirty sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes, plus three reference guides, taking you from not knowing what a share is to reading implied volatility. Free, with no sign-up required to read. It promises no returns, isn't investment advice, and hides nothing behind a paywall.
It's written by the team behind Volatly, and it starts where no investing course starts: with how many people lose money, and why.
Why this course exists
Almost all investing education has the same structural problem: it's the entrance to a funnel. A few free lessons first, then a thousand-euro mentorship, and along the way a promise nobody serious can stand behind.
This course is free from start to finish and there's nothing to buy inside it. What there is, is a company behind it: Volatly analyses the context around corporate earnings events and writes it in plain language, and this course teaches you to do exactly that work by hand.
It's an explicit trade and it's worth saying on the first screen: the course teaches you to read the map; the platform is tomorrow's map. Learning to read an event is perfectly possible on your own. Doing it for every company you care about, every quarter, is what doesn't fit into anyone's life alongside a job.
Who it's for
Anyone who's just opened a broker app with real money at stake and no reference point for what they're looking at. Anyone who's been investing a while and will admit, if honest, that they buy on instinct. And anyone who wants to understand before committing another euro.
The data describes that reader fairly precisely. The data describes the reader fairly precisely. In Spain, individual investors aged 18 to 24 have doubled in two years to 18% of the total, per a study by the trading platform eToro. Eight in ten young investors trade from a phone app, and their ideas come mainly from analysts, friends, and news media. Half of them regret an investment, either through not knowing enough or through losing money.
That's the starting point: someone with real money at stake and no reference point of their own for what's on the screen.
No background in economics needed. The writing rule for the whole course is that a twelve-year-old gets it on the first read; if something sounds like unnecessary jargon, that's a writing problem to fix.
How it works
No sign-up to read. Not one session sits behind a form. You can read all thirty starting today.
At your own pace. One session a day is about six weeks. One a week, about seven months. Both work, and the order is designed so nothing catches you without the background you need.
With three things you keep. At three points you fill something in rather than just reading: your risk profile sheet, your maximum-loss-per-trade sheet, and your one-page plan. These are decisions written down before there's money at stake.
And a milestone per chapter. Each chapter closes with a very specific sentence about something you can now do, not something you've "learned." "You can describe a chart without making anything up" is a capability you notice the next time you open the app. "You've learned technical analysis" fades within a week.
By email, if you'd rather. Getting each session in your inbox saves having to remember to come back. That does require a free sign-up, and it's the only thing that does.
The full syllabus
Eleven blocks, thirty sessions, and three reference guides. Each block closes with a specific capability, not a list of things you "now know."
Opening
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Why most people lose money investing, and what it takes not to | The real numbers on who loses, and the specific gap behind each one |
Milestone: you know the odds you're playing against and what exactly is missing.
Chapter 1 · The playing field
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| What a stock is and why a company goes public | What you actually buy, and what listing costs a company |
| What actually happens when you hit buy | How your order matches, who you buy from, and who's on the other side |
| What a stock index is and what asset types exist | Who decides what's in the S&P 500, and how six asset types differ |
Milestone: you can read the financial press front page and understand it.
Chapter 2 · Your money before the market
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| What to have sorted before investing your first euro | How much cushion, what to do about expensive debt, why timeframe changes everything |
| What "risk" really means | Volatility versus permanent loss, diversification, and leverage |
| What time does to your money | Inflation, real return, and compounding with current figures |
Milestone: your profile sheet is filled in. (First artifact.)
Chapter 3 · The mechanics
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| How to choose a broker and what happens if it fails | Regulatory registers, where your shares are, what the guarantee fund covers |
| What every trade really costs you | Spread, slippage, currency, and what it all adds up to in a year |
Milestone: you know what every trade costs and what tax takes before you hit the button.
Chapter 4 · The event: earnings
The heart of the course, and the block that most resembles what Volatly does every day.
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Why earnings move the price so much | Why a third of the annual movement fits into four days |
| What expectation a company is really competing against | Consensus, the whisper number, and why beats still fall |
| What the options market is saying before the announcement | Expected move and the collapse in implied volatility |
| How to read a full event, start to finish | Two real cases from the archive: one hit and one miss |
Milestone: you can read an event before it happens and explain the scenario in words.
Chapter 5 · Reading a company
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| How to read an income statement | The five lines, margins, and why price trades on expectations |
| Where a company's money actually is | Earnings per share, the balance sheet, and free cash flow |
| What a company is worth and what affects it | P/E, EV/EBITDA, splits, and interest rate sensitivity |
Milestone: you can open a quarterly report and know where to look.
Chapter 6 · Reading a chart
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Does technical analysis work? | What the academic evidence says, for and against |
| Structure, levels, and volume | How support and resistance actually form |
| What each indicator measures and how people fool themselves | ATR, RSI, MACD, and Bollinger with their formulas and limits |
Milestone: you can describe a chart out loud without making anything up.
Chapter 7 · Risk, probability, and survival
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Why being right isn't the same as winning | Mathematical expectancy and how a result is really measured |
| How much to risk on any single trade | Position sizing, risk of ruin, and correlation |
| Drawdowns, streaks, and why ten trades say nothing | Confidence intervals and the mathematics of recovery |
Milestone: your risk sheet is filled in. (Second artifact.)
Chapter 8 · From your head to your method
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| The biases that cost the most | Disposition effect, overconfidence, anchoring, and loss aversion |
| Why trading more makes results worse | The study proving it, FOMO, and what to do after a bad run |
| How to build a method of your own | What defines a method and what goes in a trading logbook |
| Backtesting and the four ways to fool yourself | Point-in-time, survivorship bias, and sample size |
Milestone: your one-page plan is written. (Third artifact.)
Chapter 9 · Advanced ground
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| How price forms underneath, and what options are | Auctions, the order book, and the Greeks in plain language |
| Volatility, leverage, and what the regulator banned | Volatility surface, leveraged ETFs, and CFDs |
| Factors, fat tails, and the limits of machine learning | What the evidence says and why overfitting is the central problem |
Milestone: you can read an institutional note or a paper and separate substance from noise.
Closing
| Session | What it answers |
|---|---|
| What you've learned and what's left out | Your first documented trade and where to continue with primary sources |
The three reference guides
Not part of the path: reference material you come back to when you need it.
| Guide | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Investment taxation in Spain | Savings brackets, double taxation, the two-month rule, FIFO, and fund transfers |
| The dividend, start to finish | The four dates, the ex-dividend gap, and the high-yield trap |
| Order types and how they execute | Market, limit, stop, and stop-limit, with which to use when |
What it covers against the CNMV framework
Spain's securities regulator, the CNMV, built on work by IOSCO — the international organisation of securities regulators — and published a framework of seven competency areas every retail investor should have. This course covers all seven, and it's worth stating where.
| Competency area | Sessions covering it |
|---|---|
| Basic investing concepts and principles | Opening · Chapters 1 and 2 |
| Characteristics of investment products | Chapters 1, 5, and 9 |
| The buying and selling process | Chapter 3 and the order types guide |
| Monitoring your investments | Chapters 4 and 8 |
| Investor rights and responsibilities | Chapter 3 and the taxation guide |
| Behavioural biases | Chapter 8 |
| Scams and financial fraud | Opening and Chapter 3 |
Chapters 6, 7, and 9 go beyond the framework. That's worth saying too: the regulator's framework is the floor of what you need to know, not the ceiling.
How the syllabus was built, from what sources and on what criteria, sits on the methodology page.
What this course doesn't do
- It promises no returns. Not a figure, not a portfolio example in euros, not an implication.
- It isn't investment advice. What to buy, how much, and when stays your decision.
- It gives no signals or stock lists. No session tells you what to buy.
- It hides no chapters behind a paywall. All thirty sessions and three guides are complete and open.
- It doesn't replace a tax or financial advisor for your specific situation.
- We're not an academic institution. Volatly is a private company building a market analysis platform. It isn't a university, a business school, or an accredited training centre.
- We issue no qualification. Finishing these thirty sessions earns you no diploma, no certificate, and no accreditation that counts for anything with anyone. That document doesn't exist and we're not going to invent it.
- It isn't regulated training. It's recognised by no educational or financial authority, grants no credits, and counts towards no professional requirement.
Why this isn't advice, in the legal sense
"This isn't advice" is a phrase that appears at the bottom of everything and that almost nobody explains. It has an exact legal meaning, and understanding it serves you far beyond this course: it lets you tell, in any situation, whether whoever's talking to you has legal obligations towards you or not.
Per Spain's CNMV (National Securities Market Commission), investment advice consists of making personalised recommendations about specific financial instruments. All three words matter: recommendation, personalised, about specific instruments.
Explaining how a product works isn't recommending it. Describing what an ETF (exchange-traded fund) is, how a dividend is taxed, or why a price moves after earnings is information, not counsel.
The CNMV's own guide on this is explicit on a point that fits exactly here: a recommendation distributed through distribution channels or to the general public — newspaper, magazine, any publication aimed at the public including the internet, or a radio or television broadcast — is not to be considered a personal recommendation.
The reason is obvious on reflection: a personalised recommendation requires knowing the person. A text published for anyone can't know anyone.
The practical marker. When someone genuinely advises you, they're required to put the suitability test to you: asking what you know, what experience you have, what your financial situation is, and what your objectives are. If they can't complete that test, the law forbids them from providing the service.
From which comes a rule you can apply tomorrow: if nobody has asked about your situation before telling you what to buy, they aren't advising you. And it works in reverse too: if a video, a forum, or a message tells you what to buy while knowing absolutely nothing about you, that person is taking on no responsibility for what happens to you. However convincing the advice sounds.
What regulated training exists if you want to go further
Saying "we're not an academic institution" without pointing at the ones that are would leave the job half done.
The CNMV publishes Technical Guide 4/2017, which establishes the knowledge and competence financial firms' staff must have. It distinguishes two levels: those who only inform about products, and those who advise, whose bar is higher.
And it publishes something even more useful: a public list of qualifications and certificates meeting those requirements, issued by universities and certifying bodies. The list is public, sits on the CNMV's website, and specifies in each case whether the qualification enables informing, advising, or both. It has an obvious advantage over searching online: someone with authority has already verified those programmes teach what they claim to teach.
The figure that frames the distance. The same technical guide sets the minimum mandatory continuing education for those professionals: 20 hours a year for those who inform, and 30 for those who advise. Every year, just to stay current. This entire course is around ten hours of reading, once. It's useful, it's verifiable, and it's well made, and it is nowhere close to equivalent to professional training. Saying otherwise would be exactly the kind of claim this course teaches you to distrust.
If what you want is more material at no cost, the CNMV and the Bank of Spain publish investor guides, and the CNMV's basic competency framework — built on work by IOSCO, the international organisation of securities regulators — is the same one this course's syllabus was structured against.
Who's behind it
Volatly is an event-driven market analysis and context platform: it analyses what's coming for each asset, with what volatility profile and what's at stake, and writes it in plain language before the event happens. It isn't a broker, holds no money, and executes no trades: it runs alongside whichever broker you already use.
This course exists because the same work the platform does can be done by hand, and understanding it is the only way to judge whether it's done well. In Chapter 4 you'll read two real cases from the public archive — one hit and one miss — with the scenario written before they happened.
You can see the full archive and methodology, or who's behind it.
Getting started
The first session puts the real numbers on the table: what percentage of day traders lose money, what percentage of fund managers beat their index, and the five things most people are missing.
Published July 28, 2026. Last reviewed: July 28, 2026. Tax and regulatory sections are reviewed quarterly; the taxation guide, every January.
Sources
- CNMV, Guide to Basic Investor Competencies, built on IOSCO's framework: seven areas of retail investor competency
- eToro study on retail investors in Spain: 18-to-24-year-olds doubled in two years to 18% of the total