I suggest you browse to www.meetup.com and see if there are trader meetups in your area. If there are, these are valuable people, many of whom have decades of trading experience they are willing to share. I attend four such meetups every month, and I have learned mountains of stuff from others that I would have never discovered from Google, books, and Youtube.
Well, when it comes to specialisation, you have two possible paths from here: 1. You focus on tech small caps and dig into them, read their balance sheets and do your analysis. You can expect less competition from the big guys since those companies are so small that they offer not enough liquidity for them to trade. Thus those companies are littered with daytraders, momentum traders and mom and pop investors who just trade based on price. If you have more knowledge than them (you understand, what the PR actually means...), you can either buy such a small cap before everyone else does or short them as soon as they have a parabolic move on bullshit news. 2. You focus on the big techs and their correlation with their peers, component suppliers, subcontractors and dealers. Your emphasis should be on divergence/convergence within this universe. If a big tech company makes a big move, usually it's correlated stocks move in sympathy and here you can profit from your deeper knowledge again in order to either use the big one as an indicator to trade the sympathy play or call bullshit on the move of the smaller one. The later is a little more complex since you have to know who does what for whom, which companies are competitors and so on. You need to build a watchlist of the names in your universe and follow it like a hawk. A small subcontractor just broke out cause the number of delivered units just went up 30%? Who bought those units and why? Is it because the buyer is likely to have a plus on the sales side or because something went wrong and he has to replace broken units. Figure that out before everyone else, and you have a trade. A nice primer on building watchlists is "An End To The Bull" by Gary Norden. I would grab that one right away, since it is also a primer on many things in the industry and will teach you what you can expect and how to build your carreer. Good luck, have fun and take it easy
Most of the info is baked into the cake.. Ask yourself this, why did or do all the most successful hedge funds hire consultants or insiders to give them info? Don't waste your time going over balance sheets, it's a 50/50 prop.. Trade them before or after news/earnings, volatile days...check Market Wizards 3, I forget the guy's name but that's how he made his dough,btw you claim you went to NYU and live in Ny? You're an embarrassment to all New Yorkers... Mr Muppet get a new name your an embarrassment also...meet ups are only good if your looking to meet women and that's a big stretch.
OP If you want to get the fundamentals, get a corporate finance text book and read it cover to cover and do all the math problems. Your understanding of finance will be better than 95percent of the posters on this site. After that you can focus on what interests you. And contrary to what people say, a fundamental understanding will only help your trading.
#4 Just #4 Or an applied finance degree. Why muck about with unqualified youtube / internet "education"? Presumably your previous profession required formal education also. "4. Formal (Classroom) education. I am fortunate enough to live near NYC, and have taken professional development courses there. Perhaps a course like this? https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/FINA1-CE9000-introduction-to-the-markets.html"
For what you are looking for I recommend the great courses and audible.com has the best prices. There are on bossiness topics including economics and will explain what you want to know. You can also get them at your public library. Solid academic info at a great value.
As you said...but not all Also, please do us a favour and don't post when you are drunk. Thats really an embarassment.
Fact of the matter is this: Most people, including most everyone on this forum, are simply overwhelmed by everything (economics and market). Even people having traded 10+ years might only be specialized in just one or two markets, ie. stocks or Forex. Very very few have consistent success over time, and those who do, will often refrain from bragging about it, knowing all to well how fast "it" can be lost to the markets. Even fewer have real experience and knowledge about multiple markets/instruments: stocks, Forex, futures, options, ETFs, different exchanges in all the countries, OTC, active management of companies, commodities, warrants, etc., etc. (tip of the iceberg really!). Depth in such breadth will require long time of dedication and success in one or two markets (think 15+ years minimum and very rare, or talent and inheritance from family). So every "advice" you receive will be from each person's own limited knowledge, experience or dreams. So too with every education you could possibly get. It'll be just one small part of the "whole". Especially when using fundamental data, application will be very specialized and not applicable to different fields. You can try, but I doubt anybody is able to provide that "grand clarity" of vision that you seem to seek. Why I started with reading about TA, signal processing and various techniques of reading price and volume (TA)? These ideas, while not working by themselves, can be made to work in almost any market. There will be differences, but I personally believe one starts on a good leg by analysing price-volume data and how to practically execute trades in optimal fashion. That much of the same experience can be adaptable across markets. You can study all the economics theories, all the fundamental theories, macro, etc., and get completely lost in all the theory. Then still, you need to solve how to make practical trades and decide what prices/time you want for entries/exits. This is why almost all real traders will recommend studying price action, rather than too much theory that might/might not help in trading. Of course, you can do both, and the very best do! Frankly, having a real job takes too much time/energy, so am not the best I can be ATM, in regards to trading! For fundamental route, seek fundamental people (investors), not traders.