I’ve open-sourced an “Investing for Beginners Guide” – feel free to star it if interested. Our operations team finished organizing everything yesterday, and we’ll keep adding new professional terms. Today I’ll also release a major update: the “First Lesson of Investing,” covering the few paths that can work for ordinary people. https://t.co/X79mK8QRTw

xuchonglang/investing-for-beginners

Source: https://github.com/xuchonglang/investing-for-beginners

Investing for Beginners Guide

Website: https://xiaoyinsi.com/ Wiki: https://xiaoyinsi.com/wiki License

Version

Author: Xu Chonglang

This is a public investing beginner’s guide for Chinese-speaking investors. It’s designed for anyone who wants to start learning about US stocks, options, and cryptocurrencies from scratch but doesn’t know what to learn first or how to build a complete knowledge framework.

The guide assumes no financial background. It starts with trading hours, order types, financial statements, and basic valuation, then gradually extends to option pricing, position management, wallet security, on-chain trading, and common scams — helping beginners understand the terminology and operational issues they’ll actually encounter while investing.

You can use this guide to:

• Build a basic framework for US stock investing, understanding stocks, ETFs, financial reports, valuations, and market risks.
• Learn what to check before placing an order: price, liquidity, transaction costs, and exit conditions.
• Understand option payoff structures, time decay, volatility, and maximum loss.
• Learn the basics of cryptocurrency trading, wallets, private keys, smart contracts, and DeFi.
• Identify common risks: leverage, liquidation, approval phishing, token unlocks, and on-chain attacks.
• Get started quickly via concise entries, then dive deeper into the full Wiki as needed.

This guide’s goal is not to provide “what to buy” answers, but to help you understand what you’re buying, where the risks come from, and what information to verify before investing money. Each piece of content strives to be short, practical, and link to further reading on official entries.

Why Must Ordinary People Learn and Master Investing?

Ordinary people’s income mainly comes from work, but buying a home, retirement, children’s education, and dealing with emergencies all require long-term planning.

Most people (especially the older generation) rely solely on current income and cash savings, making them vulnerable to inflation, income disruption, and declining purchasing power — often leading to a miserable life in old age. China provides zero investor education. This is similar to why “telecom fraud can never be completely eradicated” or “harassment calls never stop” — there are too many conflicting interests and extra restrictions on ordinary people.

Learning investing is essentially learning how to reasonably allocate today’s labor成果 across the future, not chasing overnight riches.

Not learning investing doesn’t mean you can avoid investing issues.

Holding cash, buying property, contributing to a pension, exchanging foreign currency, or even doing nothing — all come with returns, costs, and risks.

I’ve personally watched an incredibly brilliant senior (in development) take out a loan to buy a house in Suzhou at the peak price. No amount of advice could stop him. Years later, he was forced to add leverage to unwind loans and pledges, and even when selling the house he got screwed again — wiping out millions he had earned in his lifetime.

I’ve also seen countless very smart people in their own fields repeatedly make mistakes in investing. For example, a very close friend of mine lost 5 million yuan (built from zero) due to excessive leverage, even falling deep into online loan debt, before finally climbing back with a few lucky bets.

Many smart people can’t even beat the Nasdaq index.

“The fact is: China provides zero investor education.”

People lacking basic knowledge are naturally more susceptible to high-yield promotions, complex products, excessive leverage, and investment scams. They also find it harder to judge fees, liquidity, and maximum losses. At the very least, many people can’t even understand bank wealth management products — they blindly buy funds with the highest returns without even checking the product composition.

Of course, mastering investing doesn’t mean being able to predict the market.

I believe the truly important ability is a three-step approach:

1. First, learn to allocate assets based on goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance — divide your money into portions, each with its own purpose.
2. Then, understand the basic concepts of compounding, diversification, transaction costs, and risk boundaries in investing.
3. Finally, replace emotional chasing of highs and selling lows with long-term discipline.

The earlier you establish this framework, the more time can become an ally in accumulating assets.

Investing doesn’t guarantee wealth growth, but it will long-term affect how each person preserves purchasing power, arranges life goals, and bears risk.

Therefore, ordinary people don’t need to become professional traders, but they should have the ability to independently understand financial products, identify risks, and take responsibility for their own money.

Why Choose US Stocks and Cryptocurrencies?

US stocks and cryptocurrencies seem to belong to two different worlds, but they share a common thread: the US dollar. The dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve, trade-invoicing, and international financing currency, while the US capital market offers outstanding market depth, liquidity, and information disclosure.

Learning US stocks helps beginners understand how global companies raise capital and generate cash flow, and how interest rates, inflation, and the dollar affect asset prices.

Choosing US stocks doesn’t mean the dollar will always be strong, nor that US stocks will always rise.

Exchange rates, valuations, economic cycles, policies, and company operations can all cause losses. Its learning value lies in using a mature, richly documented market to establish a basic framework for stocks, ETFs, financial reports, and asset allocation.

The cryptocurrency market takes dollar-denominated value further on-chain.

Stablecoins like USDT, USDC can circulate 24/7 on many public blockchains and trading platforms, allowing users to transfer, trade, and settle on-chain outside traditional banking hours. From a user experience perspective, they offer a more open and efficient digital dollar vehicle, serving as an important gateway connecting traditional finance with crypto markets.

But USDT and USDC are not “the freest fiat currency,” nor are they dollar cash itself. They are dollar-pegged stablecoins managed by their issuers. Holders still bear risks related to reserves, redemption, regulation, address freezing, smart contracts, and de-pegging. Understanding these boundaries is more important than only seeing the convenience of transfers and high yields.

Learning about both markets together helps you understand both traditional and on-chain assets within the dollar system: on one side, company ownership, cash flows, and securities markets; on the other, digital assets, stablecoins, smart contracts, and open networks.

This is why this guide covers both US stocks and cryptocurrencies.

This repository is maintained by Xiaoyinsi (https://xiaoyinsi.com/). The content is organized from the Xiaoyinsi Investment Wiki (https://xiaoyinsi.com/wiki). Xiaoyinsi serves Chinese-speaking US stock and cryptocurrency investors, continuously providing structured basic knowledge, trading concepts, and risk education.

This repository does not provide personalized investment advice or promise any returns. Financial products carry the risk of principal loss. Using leverage and derivatives may amplify losses.

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text
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├── glossary/    Financial terms
└── LICENSE.md   Proprietary content license

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