Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.

I'm thinking about getting started in the stock market but before I do I want to educate myself as much as possible. There's so much information out there – it's hard to know what to read. I'd like to ask you to share what books helped you when you were a beginner. Whether the topic was about mentality, strategy, mistakes, or not about investing – if it helped you become a better investor I'd like to know about it.

Thank you very much for your time!

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Overview: With the wide spread availability of trading applications there came a number of retail traders who dove into trading without knowing the power of reading and understanding company SEC filings. SEC filings can provide critical indicators ("indicators" not "guarantees") as to a companies past and future performance. These documents can be an essential tool in helping an investor gauge whether to buy or sell a security. The purpose of the following entry is to provide a brief introduction to some of the most pertinent SEC Forms.

Why Read SEC Forms?: An important part of doing your due diligence on a company before you invest is checking out their most recent and historical SEC filings. These filings, if read and assessed properly with other market signals, may be a good indicator of a companies financial strength and institutional and insider confidence. For example, a microcap or smallcap trader will want to assess how long a company can remain financially viable without releasing another offering, or perhaps, assess at what price an investor may exercise a previously issued warrant. A midcap and largecap investor might want to know what institutions and insiders are buying, and to what extent a company is growing revenue. In short, learning to read and analyze SEC Forms (combined with other market conditions) will give you a competitive advantage as a trader.

EDGAR: There are a number of ways an investor can look up company SEC filings. However if you want to go straight to the horses mouth you go to the SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system; otherwise known as "EDGAR." I recommend simply typing in the ticker of your choosing into the "Fast Search" feature. From there you can find all of a company's SEC filings. If you really wanted to get savvy you can see all of your companies SEC filings as they are instantly filed by using your favorite RSS feed app. That's how right! for your convenience the SEC has an RSS feature for practically anything you want to look for. That way you will be among the first to be alerted when a company you're tracking files with the SEC. And just to think there are websites that charge for this kind of alert feature! Like most alerting software, its just a rip off for something you can otherwise get for free.

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