Best Day Trading Courses – 4 Top Choices You Should Know

Whether you’re new to the world of day trading or trying to shift from part-time to full-time trading, a day trading course can be an excellent investment. Day trading courses taught by professionals can expose you to new trading strategies and techniques for managing risk. Plus, many courses come with ongoing support so that you can continue to improve over time.

In this guide, we’ll explain how day trading courses work and how to choose the one that’s right for you. We’ll also highlight several of the top courses to help you kickstart your trading career. 

What Is A Day Trading Course And Why Use One?

A day trading course is an educational program, usually online, aimed at helping you learn how to successfully trade stocks. These courses are typically taught by day traders who have been highly profitable in their own trading careers. You’ll learn the basics of day trading and risk management as well as specific setups and analysis strategies used by that trader.

For relatively new day traders, day trading courses can be extremely valuable. To start, they offer an opportunity to learn a proven strategy that you can focus on to become profitable in your own trading. Importantly, many courses give you an opportunity to ask questions so that you can understand the purpose behind every aspect of the strategy.

In addition, day trading courses can help you learn how to manage risk. This is something that many inexperienced traders struggle with, but that most professional traders emphasize as a critical component of profitability. Many day trading courses focus as much on limiting losses as they do on maximizing your trading wins. 

What To Look For When Choosing A Day Trading Course

There’s no one-size-fits-all day trading course that’s best for every trader. What course is most suited for you depends on your trading goals, how much time you have to commit to both the course and to trading, and the types of strategies you want to pursue.

That said, there are a few common characteristics that top day trading courses share:

Proven Track Record

Before signing up for any day trading course, make sure to carefully research both the professional trader behind it and the course’s record. The trader running your course should have many years of experience trading on their own, and they should ideally be continuing to trade alongside you during the course. That way, you know that you’re getting accurate, up-to-date information that reflects the ever-changing strategies and tools available to day traders.

In addition, it’s a good idea to check reviews about the course itself. Almost every course will have some negative reviews – that’s the nature of online reviews – but the bulk of reviews from former students should be positive. Did these students go on to trade successfully after the end of the course? Checking reviews can also help you understand exactly what the course does and does not cover.

Interactive And Ongoing Support

While a fully pre-recorded course can be helpful, there’s simply no substitute for having access to mentoring during your course. This may not be one-to-one mentoring (this is sometimes available as an expensive add-on), but you should have opportunities to ask questions and receive feedback about your trades. This ensures that you truly understand the components of a particular strategy, so you’ll know what to do when imperfect setups or mixed signals arise.

It can be especially helpful to look for courses that offer ongoing support even after the official end of the course. That way, you can check back in after several weeks or months of trading on your own to ask any questions that have come up in the meantime. Many day trading courses also double as setup alert services, and it can be very useful to continue to have access to these alerts once you start trading on your own. 

Trading Community

Another thing worth considering when picking a day trading course is whether you will have access to a community of fellow day traders. Many courses achieve this through a chat room, where students can interact, follow each other’s trades, and ask questions of each other.

This is key because if you can develop a community during your trading course, you’ll have more support once the course ends. If you find yourself in a slump or in need of trading ideas, you can turn to your community of like-minded day traders for advice. Learning how to trade is an ongoing process. Don’t expect to watch one course, hit the ground running, and start collecting profits. You will need to refine your skillset over time, and it can be beneficial to surround yourself with the proper support system.

Best Day Trading Courses

With all that in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of the best day trading courses available today. Keep in mind that different courses focus on different types of day trading, so it’s important to think about what your goals are when selecting a course. 

Textbook Trading, by Investors Underground

Textbook Trading is essentially a 101-level course for new day traders taught by Nathan Michaud. The 8-hour, pre-recorded course takes you through the basics of charting and order routing, highlights dozens of simple setups you can use to start trading, and helps you establish trading goals and routines. This Investors Underground course is packed with chart examples, so it’s a lot more in-depth than similar courses built around day trading fundamentals. Lessons include:

• Trading Methodology
• Trading Terminology
• Chart Patterns
• OTC Trading
• Brokers
• And more

The course costs $997, and there’s no limit to how many times you can stream the video lessons. This course is most effective if you plan to join the Investors Underground community. When you join the community, you can ask questions daily and see the lessons play out in real trades. 

Tandem Trader, by Investors Underground

Tandem Trader, also taught by Nathan Michaud, is a more advanced day trading course that really focuses on strategy and trading theory. Instead of simply showing chart screenshots, this course includes tick-by-tick charts that play out in real-time while Michaud explains the setup and his decision-making process. The course also goes into detail on how you can use Level 2 exchange data and stock scanners to find trading opportunities.

The main selling point of this course is that it shows live trades. Traders can get a feel for what it’s like to be in the hot seat as a trade pans out in real-time.

Tandem Trader costs $1,497 and includes over 14 hours of streaming content. The course, while expensive on its own, can be purchased in a bundle with Textbook Trading and an annual subscription to Investors Underground for $2,697. 

Trading Tickers, by Tim Grittani

Trading Tickers includes over 28 hours of content designed to help you build your own day trading strategy. The video series covers around a dozen different setups, spending over an hour discussing the ins and outs of each one. Grittani also includes 35 live trading examples, which play out in real-time as he explains his process for identifying and executing a setup. This course is similar to Tandem Trader since it includes some live trades and commentary. 

Trading Tickers costs $1,797. There’s no built-in support with the series, but it is sold through profit.ly, which is a social day trading community built around this and other educational video series. 

Fous 4 & Fous 4×2, by Cameron Fous

Cameron Fous, a well-known day trader, offers two video courses for beginner and intermediate traders. Fous 4 covers the basics of day trading, including how to manage risk and trading psychology. The introductory course also covers the primary patterns that Fous trades, although it doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail on these.

Fous 4×2 explains the anatomy of Fous’s trading system, highlighting how he finds and trades setups. This is much more actionable for intermediate day traders, as it covers the process of scanning for trade opportunities and analyzing setups.

Both of these courses are well-produced and offer an actionable trading system. That said, the Fous system isn’t as diverse as some of the strategies taught in the other courses (which can be viewed as both a pro and a con).

Fous 4 and Fous 4×2 cost $597 each or $997 together. Fous also has an Alerts subscription service, which costs $147 per month, which gives you access to a chat room with Fous and other traders as well as alerts about the stocks he is trading right now.

Is It Worth Paying for a Day Trading Course?

If you’re not in the habit of paying for online courses and education, you may get sticker shock when you see the prices of popular trading courses. There’s no doubt that trading courses are expensive. The question is – are they worth it?

There are a few things worth considering.

The first question you should consider is – how much capital do you have?

If you have $3,000 to commit to trading, it may not make sense to purchase a $1,500 course. The lessons in the course would have to help you double your remaining $1,500 just to break even. While that’s possible in certain market conditions, it’s no easy feat. On the flip side, if you have $10,000 to commit to trading, a course may be a good investment. Here’s why….

Learning how to day trade through experience alone can be costly. Depending on your account size, you can easily lose $100, $200, $500 or more on a single trade. Often times, that losing trade is followed by an “aha moment” where you recognize exactly how you messed up. Sometimes, the “aha moment” doesn’t come and you repeat the mistake multiple times. If you had experienced that “aha moment” before taking a big loss, you would have an advantage.

Therefore, it’s important to consider the following components of “value” before buying a trading course:

1. The educational value (same way you would analyze a college course)
2. How much money can the course help you save? (i.e. avoid trading losses)
3. How much money can the course help you make? (i.e. increase trading profits)

While it’s difficult to quantify all of these value metrics, you should definitely consider them to some extent. Day trading is not easy and you shouldn’t expect to become a profitable trading master by simply watching a course. Most successful traders have spent thousands of hours mastering their crafts. You will need to do the same.

A trading course can set you on the right track. It can help you figure out which strategies are worth focusing on and which mistakes you need to avoid. These lessons can be incredibly valuable as you set out on your trading career.

What About Free Trading Courses and Cheaper Courses?

The price of day trading courses can range from free to five figures. While quality is not necessarily relative to price, there are a few points worth considering.

First, let’s address “cheaper” day trading courses. You can find trading courses on sites like Udemy and Coursera for $20 or less. While these courses will save you money in the short-term, you need to consider the three components of value we discussed above. Day trading is an art that only a small group of people have mastered. Misinformation can be costly.

Teaching trading is not the same as teaching basic skills. For example, if you want to learn how to change the brakes on your car, you don’t need to learn from an elite specialist. The process is straightforward and can be taught with basic step-by-step instructions. Day trading is different. While anyone can teach you about key terms or how the market works, only experienced traders can teach the true art of trading. While I haven’t gone through the course work of every $20 course, I have a hard time seeing a 7-figure trader spending dozens of hours compiling their secrets into a $20 course.

Now, what about the free information on Google and YouTube?

There is actually a lot of great free trading information available on the web. Many credible traders offer a lot of free content to promote their paid content. There’s no doubt you can learn a lot for free, and every aspiring trader should get in the habit of researching concepts they are unfamiliar with. Don’t know what VWAP is? Google it. Don’t know what a market maker is? Google it.

There are two main problems with free information.

First, you don’t know what you don’t know. You have to know what VWAP is before you can research it. You have to know what an ascending triangle pattern is before you can learn how to use it. While there is tons of great information available, new traders may not know where to start.

The second problem with free information is that it lacks structure. One of the main benefits of a course is that it follows a structured curriculum. The course creator lays out the information you need to know and the order you should learn it in. This makes your job as a student much easier, and this is why most people pay for courses. You can learn just about everything you need to know about accounting for free online, but people pay for accounting courses (at college or elsewhere) so they can get access to a structured curriculum.

Ultimately, free information can serve as a good starting point for new traders who are hesitant to spend money on a course. That said, if you find the hunt for free information to be overwhelming, you may consider a more structured approach, like a course.

Conclusion: Best Day Trading Courses

Signing up for a day trading course is a good way to take your trading to the next level. If you’re just starting out, courses like Fous 4 and Textbook Trading can help you learn the basics of day trading. If you want to dive deep into advanced strategies, we recommend Fous 4×2, Tandem Trader, or Trading Tickers.