Frequently Asked Questions
What this site is, what it refuses to do, and who actually wrote each page.
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Getting Started
Written for people roughly 16 and up who want to understand markets without a finance degree -- old enough to earn money and start deciding what happens to it, not yet expected to already know any of this. Younger readers can follow it fine with an adult alongside, and adults who never got around to learning it use these pages too. No term gets used before it is defined on the same page.
Nope. Every page is free, there is nothing to buy, no account to create and no deposit required. Nothing here connects to a brokerage either, so practising means writing a decision down with the reason behind it and checking back later -- this page sets out how to run that so it teaches something instead of flattering you.
Opening a brokerage account in your own name takes 18 in the US. Under that, a parent or guardian can open a custodial account that holds assets for you until you take control. Waiting on paperwork is not the constraint though -- the thing an early start actually buys is more years for the same money to compound, which is arithmetic rather than a head start in talent. Learn the mechanics now, and the account becomes a formality later.
Start with what a share actually is, then how size and volume change what a price means. From there the screeners let you apply published criteria yourself rather than watching someone else apply them. Pace is yours; none of it expires.
Screeners
A screener filters a large list of companies down to the ones meeting conditions you set -- price below some multiple, debt under some ratio, profits rising for consecutive years. Each of ours has those conditions pre-written by whoever invented the strategy, so you are reading their rules rather than inventing thresholds you have no basis for choosing.
No! Our screeners are for educational purposes only. They show you what legendary investors look for, but they don't tell you to buy or sell anything. Always do your own research and consider talking to a financial advisor before investing real money.
Each famous investor has their own style! Buffett looks for wonderful companies at fair prices. Graham looks for bargains with a margin of safety. Lynch looks for growth companies you can understand. Icahn looks for underperforming companies with hidden value. Try them all and see which approach resonates with you!
The screeners are static pages. Their numbers come from a public feed saved into the site after each weekday's close, so anything you see during a session is yesterday's picture -- and the page prints the date attached to those figures, flagging them when they have gone more than a few days old rather than letting "real data" stand unexamined. If the file cannot load at all, the same screen runs on invented example values so the method can still be practised. Read the line above the results before quoting anything.
Investing Basics
You can start with very little! Many brokerages let you buy fractional shares, so you could start with just $1. But more importantly, start with knowledge first. Learn as much as you can before putting any money in the market.
Yes, absolutely. Investing involves risk, and you can lose some or all of your investment. That's why everything here starts with education and practice before real money moves. Broad US indexes have trended upward across long stretches of history; they have also fallen by half more than once inside those stretches, and nothing obliges the next decade to behave like the last one.
Same thing, two altitudes. The equity of a company is cut into equal units; a "share" is one of those units, and "stock" is the holding you build from them. Own 100 shares of a company with 1,000,000 outstanding and you hold a ten-thousandth of whatever is left for owners after everybody the company owes has been paid -- which is why that residual claim is the last thing to get money in a failure, not the first.
Both, sorted by when the money is needed. Money you expect to spend inside a couple of years belongs somewhere boring and available -- cash you might need next spring is not an investment regardless of what it earns. Money with a decade or more before it matters is where equity risk makes sense, because short stretches can be brutal while long stretches have historically carried owners' returns upward. That second sentence is a description of history, not a promise about your account.
Safety & Privacy
Built with that reader in mind: no accounts, no comments, no chat, nothing user-submitted, and no route from these pages into placing a real trade. Content assumes zero prior knowledge and does not soften risk to keep you reading. It still cannot substitute for an adult who knows your situation, so bring a parent or guardian into any decision involving actual money.
No accounts, no forms, no advertising scripts and no analytics scripts -- there is currently no third-party tracker running on these pages, so nothing here builds a profile of you. Two things still exist outside that comfort zone: your network and hosting provider keep ordinary server logs, which GitHub handles under its own privacy statement, and anything you email us sits in mail systems we do not operate. See the Privacy Policy.
Nothing is hidden here. There is no private area, no saved history and no personalisation -- every page is a public URL anyone could open, so sharing what you are reading is trivial. The reverse works too: whatever you send to our mailbox leaves your device permanently, which is the part worth thinking about before writing (the contact page lists what not to include).
Technical
Drafts sometimes start with a language model -- an open-weights model called through NVIDIA's API -- but no page reaches the site unreviewed. Writing goes through a human editor line by line, and a publication gate blocks anything that fails checks on sourcing, fabricated figures, dead links or disclosure wording. The reasoning comes from published letters, filings and standard textbooks; the model saves typing, it does not decide what is true.
There is no fixed schedule. New pages publish once they have been checked against primary sources, because a quota would push unverified content onto a site read by people spending their own money. Screener data refreshes on weekdays after each market close, and the whole site rebuilds automatically on GitHub Pages the moment anything is committed.
Free to read, with no accounts and no adverts. The code, the articles and even the checks that gate them live in our GitHub repository, and pull requests are welcome. Topic requests go through the contact page.
No catch, and no affiliate links today -- nothing on this site earns a commission if you buy something. Hosting, the model used for drafts and the domain are paid for by whoever runs the project. Should sponsored or affiliate links ever appear, they will say so on the page they sit on and get listed in the disclaimer rather than hiding in a footer nobody reads.