Hi Emma, i'm no expert but am on a similar educational journey as you so thought I'd share a couple of resources and thoughts.
1. 6 months is a fairly short timeframe... I reckon you'll smash your partner just by heavily focusing on capital preservation - stop losses, don't sit on profits (take them!!), not falling for FOMO and not investing in anything just because there's STT regulars getting excited about it.
2. Read the STT forum. Every day. You'll get great tips with everyone else basically doing the work for you, but don't buy straight away. Good STT tips
frequently see an immediate rise., so give it a couple of days to come back to a reasonable price. Remember that everyone that puts a tip up will have already taken a position... dig around on the stock forums and work out how long that person has been following the stock (if they are active on the stock forum) to try to get a feel for what price they may have paid. Often you'll find they've already made several bags!! If the stock has been consolidating for some time, then it may also be safe to buy. Of course you need to fully research every stock first, but you probably aren't going to know straight away what sort of value a stock presents compared to its peers, at least not until you are familiar with the peers also and that sort of research takes time, which you may or may not have, so allow yourself a margin for error by using TA to set a buy and wait for it to fill. Look to buy just above clear support levels and lower trend lines etc.
3. Keeping it simple, focus on the tightly held share registers, management with good track records, companies with cash and low cash burn and quality assets (high grades, low operating costs/capex and sovereign/location risk etc).
4. Learn basic TA to get a feel for when it might be safe to enter... support/resistance, moving averages, MACD, RSI and bollinger bands, along with some basic chart patterns and being able to identify when something is about to or has just broken out of a trend.
Here is a list books that 952i passed around previously.
View attachment 901091
I have these in PDF format... happy to pass them on via email or dropbox or something.
Also, the knowledge libraries are invaluable information, although somewhat jumbled in their order.
Knowledge Library 1.0
http://hotcopper.com.au/threads/sho...y-no-unauthorised-posts.2634026/#.VlHu6o9OJaQ
Knowledge Library 2.0
https://hotcopper.com.au/threads/short-term-knowledge-library-2-0-this-thread-is-read-only-no-unauthorised-posts.3141533/
Good luck