Investing Basics From Morningstar

For what seemed like an eternity, my savings were directed into a money market fund for a down payment on my condo. Now that I have closed on my condo, I will be directing my savings towards maximizing retirement accounts. Currently, I have my retirement assets (Roth IRA) in a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund. I do not have an asset allocation plan because I don’t have enough assets to meet minimum requirements and maintain a diversified portfolio. As soon as I have enough assets to diversify even minimally I will do so. For this reason I will be doing a lot of research on asset allocation and investing in general.

Most of my investing knowledge comes from books that are listed in the right-hand column of the web page and websites such as Motley Fool and Investopedia. I recommend “The Four Pillars of Investing“, ” and “Common Sense on Mutual Funds” for investing basics.

Recently, I stumbled upon a stellar investing tutorial by Morningstar. Morningstar calls it an investing classroom that focuses on four topics: stocks, funds, bonds and portfolio. The stocks, funds and portfolio catalogs have five different course levels. The bonds curriculum has only two different course levels. In total, the investing classroom offers 172 different courses.

Each course has a mini five question quiz to test your knowledge. If you get enough quiz questions correct you are rewarded with a free 60 day Morningstar Premium subscription.

So far, I’ve completed 66% of the courses on the 400 course level for stocks. I have greatly increased my knowledge of investing with regards to evaluating stocks and accounting. The books that I mentioned above did not really get into individual stock valuations as they mostly recommend index investing. If you’re looking for a great, free resource for stock valuations and individual stock investing check out the Morningstar investing tutorial.