The Best Day Trading Schools and Courses

Day trading is a tough career. Whether you're new to the field or an experienced veteran who wants a support network of other professional day traders, finding a day-trading school that offers courses and mentoring is an efficient way to get the education and tools required to succeed in the markets. Many day-trading schools offer online courses, video conferencing, in-class or group sessions and/or personal consultations.

The price, support systems and overall quality varies dramatically from school to school. So here's a little day-trading academy review that will point out the key aspects to ponder when evaluating an institution, along with popular and reputable financial trading schools.

In 2017, Investopedia launched its Become a Day Trader course, taught by a Wall Street trader with over 30 years of experience. The course covers everything from how to create a trading plan to step-by-step instructions for making trades. You'll go through three hours of on-demand video (at your own pace), and along with practice trading scenarios and quizzes, you'll end up with your own personalized trading plan. The instructor will walk you through a step-by-step playbook for six trades that you can use right away.

If you're interested in other day-trading course options, read on to learn about some other great resources.

One of the first things new traders look at when picking a day-trading school is, not surprisingly, its cost. While the price of tuition is an important factor, it shouldn't be the only factor. If they jump in without guidance or research, most novice day traders will lose a lot of money very quickly. If day trading the stock market, for example, that potentially means losing a large chunk of $25,000 or more – the minimum account balance required to trade on margin as imposed by the Financial Industry Regulator Authority (FINRA). From this perspective, spending $3,000 or even $10,000 for some solid training may actually be cheaper over the long run than attempting to day trade on your own.

The key phrase above is "solid training," which comprises three elements: foundation, mentoring and support.

• Foundation gives you knowledge about the market you wish to day trade, as well as strategies to help you extract a profit from the market. While strategies vary, for the most part, this information can be found on the web (via online stock trading, options trading or futures trading courses) or in textbooks for little to no cost. Many day-trading schools even give away their strategies for free (because the strategy is only a part of becoming a successful trader).
• Mentoring – whether by attending regular webinars, having trades critiqued or receiving one-on-one coaching – is more pivotal to success than just the information a trader receives from books or articles. The mentoring stage introduces an objective observer to your trading. It is very hard to see our own mistakes, but someone else who knows what to look for can often spot those errors immediately, correct us and provide a better way of trading. It's like trying to fix your golf swing without the aid of a video camera or a golf pro watching. Since you can't see what you are doing while you are swinging (trading), you're bound to make the same mistakes over and over again, even while working hard to correct what you think is wrong. Mentoring removes that hurdle, makes the process much more efficient and is likely to result in quicker progress than attempting to fix things on your own.

Day-trading schools tend to focus on different markets – equities, futures, forex, etc. Here are day-trading schools that offer solid foundations, mentoring and support in their specialties. (Prices, while current as of February 2019, are subject to change.)

Stock Market Courses

One of the largest trading schools is the Online Trading Academy (OTA). The school began as the training arm of a trading floor in 1997, offering daily coaching sessions. Gradually, it shifted its focus to help more traders by providing classes, workshops, online courses and free trading resources, opening its first training center (despite its name) in 2001. More than 250,000 traders are in the OTA community, with live and online classes held around the United States and the world at more than 40 campuses.

Unlike other day-trading schools, OTA offers curricula for several markets, including forex and futures, as well as wealth-management courses, but it's especially renowned for its stock market classes. Whatever the focus, its approach is learning in stages. For stock traders, for example, the journey begins with the Free Half-Day Class, a workshop where you learn to create a trading plan and implement a rule-based trading system. Next comes the Core Strategy course. Part one is a five-day live workshop (or 10 three-hour online sessions), and part two is a two-day live course (or four three-hour online sessions). The courses are priced at $5,000 and $2,000, respectively. Those who take the course can come back and redo it as many times as they like, for life, providing traders with continual support, refreshers and guidance even after they have completed their training.

In this series of interactive lectures and trading sessions, core strategies and methodology are taught. OTA's main focus is on supply-and-demand imbalances, a method that allows for relatively low-risk trades compared to the potential rewards. Graduates can further their education with more advanced classes and take courses related to other markets. OTA also offers a select number of specialty courses, including topics such as trading psychology and technical analysis strategies.

Online Stock Market Courses

If you're interested in day trading stocks, the The Stock Whisperer (aka Stefanie Kammerman) offers a number of different courses and services. She began trading in 1994 and in 2010 began teaching in an online chat room. The courses teach you the strategies Kammerman uses, along with plenty of examples. After taking a course you can join The Java Pit to see more examples, or you can continue trading on your own with your newfound knowledge.

The Stock Whisperer focuses on tape reading (time and sales), spotting big buyers and sellers (prints), volume analysis, support and resistance, and dark pools. Counting the Cards of Wall Street is one of the main day-trading courses offered, via three pre-recorded parts ($99, $199 and $199, respectively). You can also get all three courses (along with What's Inside the Candle, which is $199) in the Ruby Educational Package Plus for $499. The package deal offers significant savings over buying the courses individually. There are a number of other courses, including swing trading courses, boot camps and one-on-one coaching.

Those who've mastered the cards trilogy can sign up for a two-week, five-hours-a-day boot camp and live seminar. Held bi-monthly, it includes competitions with simulated trades.

Options Trading Courses

If you're interested in trading options, TradePro Academy has a number of different courses and services available. Options aren't typically day traded, but based on the strategies you will learn, you can make short-term options trades for both day and swing trading.

The Swing Trader course introduces traders to the options market and teaches a reliable options trading strategy where risk and reward are fixed on each trade. The course focuses on assessing volatility, picking the best options to trade, building a trading plan, placing orders, capital management, managing trades, assessing profit/loss scenarios, part-time trading and a full day of live trading. It costs $99 a month.

TradePro Academy's Trader Pro course focuses on futures trading and offers a daily live trading room. The monthly subscription to this service is $129. You can get a better deal if you go with the TraderPro Elite Bundle, though, which combines the two services and includes group coaching once a month and priority support. The bundle is available for $169 a month.

George Papazov is the founder of TradePro Academy. He began trading in 2001 and started TradePro in 2012.

Futures Trading Courses

The Day Trading Academy (DTA) offers traders the opportunity to learn to deal in a variety of market conditions in the futures markets – calm, volatile or in between. The DTA method centers on reading price action, so while indicators may be used, they aren't relied upon. The Day Trading Academy was started in 2011 by Marcello Arrambide, a professional day trader since 2002 and a globe trotter who also founded the popular Wandering Trader blog.

More than 50,000 traders subscribe to the DTA newsletter, which provides free resources and trading advice and outlines how to gain access to the futures day-trading course. You can view one live trading class for free. Entering the program – newcomers are accepted monthly – includes access to the classes, both live and recorded, that teach traders about the futures market, as well as core day-trading strategies.

The curriculum is split into four sections: beginner, intermediate, advanced and pro. It includes an online course with reading and loads of videos highlighting each point. It goes from simple concepts with technical analysis like support and resistance areas, trend lines and price action, to more advanced concepts like trading psychology, emotional intelligence and high-probability trades with at least a 2:1 reward vs. risk.

Once traders are familiar with the material, they attend live webinars, held during market hours twice a week, to see how the strategies are applied in real time. This also provides an opportunity to ask questions and interact with professional traders. Daily recaps at the end of the day highlight the trade signals that occurred.

The course is currently $2,997 and includes (all online) access, three months of one-on-one mentoring, weekly webinars/live trading classes, review classes and video recaps showing the main opportunities (based on the strategy) each day. Packages with additional mentoring time are also available.

While traders can use the method to trade all day, the DTA focuses primarily on trading near market open, attempting to profit by only trading for a couple hours each day. Traders in the program take screenshots of their trades, send them into support and receive video feedback from a professional trader on how to improve entries and exits, and how to better read the price action to improve decision-making.

Training is provided in an online setting, making it accessible to anyone in the world.

Foreign Exchange (Forex) Trading Courses

The forex market is open 24 hours. A swing trade (which lasts more than a day) doesn't have any more restrictions imposed on it than a day trade would. So schools that focus on forex often cover both day trading and swing trading.

Winner's Edge Trading began as a blog in 2009, providing free trade signals, strategies and advice, which it still does today. Not so much a formal day-trading academy as an online tutorial center and trading room, Winner's Edge provides its core strategy for free – to more than 70,000 subscribers – as well as frequent blog and video posts, which highlight current and upcoming trades using the "Double Trend Trap" strategy.

The strategy can be used in any time frame, although trade signals are primarily traded on the hourly chart in the New York Session Trading Room. Trades typically last about 18 hours, according to Casey Stubbs, the CEO, and there are about 10 trade signals a week. Traders can also adapt the strategy to shorter time frames if desired for more frequent or quicker trades.

Joining the trading room is $97 per month, and promotions are often available for multi-month sign-ups. The training begins with learning the core system in detail, as well as more advanced strategies. Sessions give traders a chance to ask questions and see trades occurring in a live environment, as well as manage existing trades.

In 2014, Winner's Edge introduced its Extreme Growth Mentoring Series ($397). Once their training is complete, members are provided with a monitored demo account, in which a professional trader provides feedback on the trader's performance. The ideas is that novices need someone over their shoulder (figuratively) to point out what is being done well and what is being done poorly, and then allowing them to take corrective measures.

Cost is an important factor when deciding which day-trading school to join, but it isn't the only factor. Dishing out a few thousand dollars up front (or a few hundred monthly) to get an options trading education, a power trading workshop or even just a few stock market courses or futures trading courses may be a good investment if they cut your learning curve and get you on the path to profitability quicker. It's like paying college tuition so that, down the road, you can make a better income.

What the school gives you should be worth the cost, though. Any day trading academy worth its salt should offer you a good foundation of information to build on, mentoring by knowledgeable and successful pros to help you understand the information and fully implement it in the market, and a support network (via emails, webinars or chat rooms) where successful traders using the same methods can interact and help each other if required. The foundation and mentoring stages should get you to a comfort point when day trading, and hopefully a profitable position. The post-graduate network will help you succeed and stay on track even after your initial training is done.