The Beginner Investor's Blueprint
Everything a complete beginner needs to make their first investment, free and complete: which account to open, which fund to choose, how to automate the whole thing, and exactly what to do when markets fall. No jargon without a definition, no upsell hiding in chapter nine, and no reading list at the end. It ends with your first $100 actually invested.
If you've spent years knowing you should invest and quietly not doing it, this was written for you. The whole subject is smaller than it looks from the outside; someone just has to show you the boring, reliable path through it in plain English. That's this book.
Want the companion Starter Kit too (a printable 30-day checklist, a compound growth calculator, a fund cheat sheet, a plain-English glossary, and more)? It's free with the email edition at www.MattDanadel.com. Education, not financial advice; investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.
The Complete Trader
Most traders don't fail because they read a chart wrong. They fail because one oversized position met one ordinary losing streak. The Complete Trader starts where the failure actually happens: before the first chart, you'll learn to size every position so that no single trade, and no bad week, can take you out of the game. That one habit is the difference between traders who last years and traders who last months, and almost nobody teaches it first.
From that foundation, the book walks you through the entire landscape a retail trader actually faces: how markets and prices really work, what fundamentals can and can't tell you, the honest version of technical analysis, and the power tools (options, futures, and Bitcoin, including leverage and perpetuals) with their guards on and their bills attached. Thirty-four chapters across six parts, in plain English, with every term defined the moment it appears and both sides of every tool shown, the payoff and the price. It ends with something most trading content never produces: your own written plan, a journal that grades you honestly, and a first 30 days laid out step by step.
Written for complete beginners who want the whole picture in one honest pass, and for self-taught traders who can find entries but keep giving the wins back. Instant PDF download, designed edition, readable on any device. Education, not financial advice; trading involves substantial risk, and most people who attempt it lose money. This book says that on page one, which is exactly why it's worth reading.
The Complete Guide to Options Trading
Most people trade options for years without ever learning what the trader on the other side of their order knows. They learn a strategy's name from a video, they buy the setup from a screenshot, and they pay, month after month, for edges they can't see. The Complete Guide to Options Trading exists to end that. It assumes you know nothing on page one and takes you all the way to practitioner: what an option actually is, where premium really comes from (hedging, not predictions), the Greeks as one working dashboard, volatility in practice, and how to find a trade honestly.
Then the library: sixteen strategies, from the long call to the box spread, each given the same complete dossier treatment: purpose, construction, maximum profit and loss, break-evens, management rules, and the famous failure mode the brochure never mentions. Fifty chapters, one internally consistent option chain running through the entire book, and more than 150 practice problems with a full answer key, so you finish having actually done options hundreds of times before risking a dollar. The printable Strategy Quick-Reference Cards are included: one card per strategy with the numbers that matter, sized for your desk.
This is the deep one. It is not for anyone looking for signals or "set and forget income"; it's for the reader who wants to walk into the options arena knowing what the professionals know. Instant PDF download. Education, not financial advice. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor; certain positions can lose more than their initial cost. Read the OCC's "Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options" before trading.
The Complete Trader Bundle
The full shelf bundle: the risk-first foundation that teaches you to survive and operate in any market, and the complete options apprenticeship that takes one instrument to professional depth. The two books share one language (position sizing off the stop, expectancy, the journal), so everything you learn in the first compounds in the second. Both designed PDFs plus the printable strategy card deck, delivered instantly. $19.99 less than buying them separately. Education, not financial advice; both books state the risks plainly, because that's the point of them.