The author
Who writes this site.
Matt Danadel is a self-taught investor and trader who teaches personal finance from first principles at mattdanadel.com. Since 2017 he has studied and practiced investing, trading, and options through firsthand experience, and he now explains all three the way he wishes they had been explained to him: every term defined, every calculation shown, and the odds stated honestly, even when they are the bad news. He writes a research-backed blog covering investing, money, trading, and options; publishes a free investing ebook, The Beginner Investor's Blueprint, alongside paid guides to trading (The Complete Trader) and options (The Complete Guide to Options Trading); and teaches a free nine-module Learn Trading course covering everything from risk and position sizing to trading psychology. Everything he writes is built around one simple idea: understand the reasoning, not just the conclusion.
Everything published here is education, written for the reader I used to be: smart, new, and tired of explanations that seem designed to keep the subject out of reach. The longer version of how that started lives on the about page.
What I write
The Beginner Investor's Blueprint
The free beginner's ebook. It ends with your first $100 actually invested, not with a pitch.
The Complete Trader
Trading education that puts risk management before any strategy. Survive first, win second.
The Complete Guide to Options Trading
The honest options textbook: every strategy priced with its costs, odds, and failure modes attached.
Learn Trading
A free nine-module trading curriculum. No signup, no samples withheld.
The practice behind the writing
- I read annual reports and 10-Ks before owning a single share, and the quarterly filings after.
- I journal my trades, and the losing ones get written up in more detail than the winners.
- I size positions off the stop and think in R-multiples, not dollar hopes.
- I have practiced what I write about: long-term index investing, swing trades with written plans, day trading attempted honestly, and options studied down to the Greeks.
Where the line sits
- I teach how things work. I do not give personalized financial advice, and nothing here is a recommendation.
- I never publish a number I cannot trace to the organization that produced it.
- No sponsorships and no fund paying for placement. The one referral on this site is a savings-account referral link, disclosed in plain words right beside the link itself; anything similar ever added will be disclosed the same way.
- No income claims and no performance screenshots, mine or anyone's.
The full version of these rules, including how corrections are handled, is on the editorial standards page.