Whether you are a novice trader looking to learn more about investing or an experienced investor searching for the right resources to stay educated about financial markets, Interactive Brokers is here for you! Interactive Brokers Group, which was founded as a market maker in 1977, now operates one of the largest electronic trading platforms in the United States. Clients from over 200 countries and territories worldwide can access 150 markets, 23 currencies and invest in a wide range of global products from a single integrated platform. Known for transparent and low commissions, breadth of product globally, powerful trading platforms, and advanced technology, Interactive Brokers has historically catered to experienced traders interested in educating themselves. For this reason, Interactive Brokers offers many educational resources that can be used to help students gain financial insights, learn how to trade for themselves, and teach others how to navigate the public markets.
Now more than ever, college students are becoming financially savvy and opting to strategically invest their money through stocks, bonds, and funds. Instead of simply letting your money sit in a bank account, join the wave of growing your wealth through smart investing! Want to begin developing healthy financial habits and reaping the benefits of a high returns-to-effort ratio inherent in investing your money, but don’t know where to start? Interactive Brokers is the ultimate resource hub for anything you may need to begin your investing journey and become well-versed in intelligent investing practices.
Few businesses and investment advising services pay attention to the distinct financial needs of college students, nor do they present sufficient guidance for young adults looking to familiarize themselves with the industry. Thankfully, IBKR Campus is a resource center that houses six different educational resources aimed to help young traders like you gain better intuition about financial markets and stay updated on current events in the industry.
TRADER’S ACADEMY
Making your first investment decision can be made easier with the help of Trader’s Academy, a catalog of free, accessible, and straightforward online courses on trading fundamentals. To reinforce the content of each lesson, it provides follow-up quizzes and notes, offering the structured learning atmosphere of a typical college course. Gone are the days of digging through the Internet for bits and pieces of educational information.
Trader’s Academy enables you to learn about the advantages and distinctive features of anything ranging from equities, fixed-income investments, and options to crypto, futures, forex, and beyond. Additionally, if you are comfortable with the basics of investing and want to dive right in, but you find it difficult to navigate IBKR’s trading platforms (e.g. Trader Workstation (TWS), IBKR Mobile, Client Portal, and TWS API applications), fear not – Trader’s Academy offers tutorials for navigating them.
IBKR WEBINARS | TRADER’S INSIGHT | IBKR QUANT
Sometimes, you might find yourself in need of a break from your studies and suddenly yearning to feed your curiosity with topics not traditionally discussed in the classroom or around campus. Other times, it may be hard to put your finger on what exactly you want to broaden your worldview with. Satisfy that need with the live and recorded trading webinars available through IBKR Webinars. These are completely free webinars hosted by industry professionals from leading financial services companies and research institutions across the world. Don’t miss out on the next big trend in the investing world.
Perhaps you are experiencing that same hunger for acquiring new knowledge about investing, but your learning style is more receptive to text-based or visually-oriented educational content. Chances are that if you have been itching to understand a niche or confusing financial development, Traders’ Insight will most likely provide you with the intuition that you need. Trader’s Insight features the ultimate collection of financial market commentary, analysis, and insights, unlocking countless opportunities for you to stay on top of the ever-changing state of the markets. The articles and videos published reflect a diversity of thought produced by over 70 industry professionals, ensuring that you have the chance to absorb not just one, but multiple perspectives on today’s most popular issues and trends in the financial world.
Along that same vein, if you are an auditory learner and prefer tuning in to vocally-presented content, then enriching your investing knowledge through Traders’ Insight Radio’s informative podcast episodes can be especially effective. You can listen to podcast episodes during their daily walks to and from the Quad, on the shuttle, on a quick coffee break, or even at the gym. Gone is the limitation of only gaining exposure to the financial industry via dense and elaborate economic literature or magazines—we do enough reading for our classes, so why not relax our eyes for a bit and engage our minds in a different way?
For the more quantitatively-advanced individuals out there, IBKR Quant may be a better option for you, since it caters to those with a strong interest in programming, deep learning, IBKR API, AI, blockchain, and other revolutionary technologies emerging in prominence today. IBKR Quant is a blog that not only contains keen insight into the financial industry but also provides sample code to facilitate the sharpening of your skills.
In addition to learning resources, Interactive Brokers provides powerful trading tools. Among these tools is IBKR GlobalTrader, a mobile trading application that allows investors to invest globally in stocks. Launched just a few weeks ago, the app’s streamlined design makes it easy and simple to use for novice investors yet powerful enough for experienced stock traders. One of the many useful features that IBKR GlobalTrader provides is fractional shares trading, which gives investors the ability to invest in U.S. shares with as little as $1, regardless of the stock price. This feature gives new and more cautious investors the ability to take small risks and enables more advanced traders to experiment with a multitude of trading strategies.
Recently, Interactive Brokers launched IMPACT, a mobile trading app that makes it simple for investors to identify investments that align with their core values. The IMPACT app also flags companies that have questionable business practices. Whether you are an environmentalist seeking to invest in green energy companies or a labor rights activist looking to invest in unionized firms, IMPACT will give you the ability to identify investments that are helping to shape the future you wish to see. Plus, anyone can practice trading with $10,000 in simulated cash before creating an account.
Share what you know with your peers! Whether you are a professor teaching your students the ins and outs of investing or the president of a finance-oriented student group, IBKR Student Trading Lab can help bring real-world experience to your classroom.
Integrating interactive activities that allow students to learn by doing is tough, but the Student Trading Lab enables you to do just that. The lab simulates the real-world investment landscape by providing students with paper trading accounts of $1,000,000 in simulated cash, where its balance changes with students' individual trades, just like how it would play out in actual markets. Visualization of how personal assets can fluctuate depending on various investment conditions is incredibly conducive to students’ understanding of the concepts covered in class. Economic tradeoffs become more salient and make more sense. Students are able to replicate the real-world trading experience without the risk of losing any real money.
Whether you are an experienced investor or a novice trader, Interactive Brokers is the perfect online broker for you. Interactive Brokers makes it simple to learn about investing. With the variety of tools and resources that Interactive Brokers provides, you can be confident that you have the knowledge and skills to make smart investment decisions. At the tip of your fingers, you have a centralized learning and investing experience across a variety of financial products. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to grow your money—invest in the financial world with Interactive Brokers today!
This article is sponsored by Interactive Brokers LLC member SIPC.
The Crimson's news and opinion teams—including writers, editors, photographers, and designers—were not involved in the production of this article.