# 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](concepts.html) for the mental models and the [Glossary](glossary.html) 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.

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## 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**](learning-foundations.html) | Shares, markets, risk vs. return, compounding, diversification, total return | `stock-eval` |
| 2 | [**Reading Financial Statements**](learning-statements.html) | Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow, free cash flow, red flags | `financial-report-analyst`, `10k-digest`, `fundamental-analysis` |
| 3 | [**Judging Business Quality**](learning-quality.html) | ROIC vs. WACC, margins, moats, leverage, capital allocation | `stock-eval`, `fundamental-analysis`, `competitor-analysis`, `dividend-analysis` |
| 4 | [**Valuation Essentials**](learning-valuation.html) | Price vs. value, DCF, multiples, comparables, margin of safety | `dcf-valuation`, `stock-valuation` |
| 5 | [**Reading the Market**](learning-market.html) | 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**](learning-portfolio.html) | Allocation, position sizing, rebalancing, risk-adjusted return, behavioral pitfalls | `portfolio-review`, `stock-screener`, `result-validator` |
| 7 | [**The Professional's Playbook**](learning-playbook.html) | 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**](learning-case-amd.html) | 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.

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## 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).

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## 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](concepts.html)).

- Want to *do* an analysis? See [Choose a Skill](choose-a-skill.html) to map your goal to the right framework.
- Want the *mental models* the skills encode? See [Concepts](concepts.html).
- Want a term defined fast? See the [Glossary](glossary.html).
- Want to see it end-to-end? See [Use Cases](use-cases.html).

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> **Start here:** [Investing Foundations →](learning-foundations.html)

*Educational content only. Not financial advice.*