Professional hedge-fund manager Lex van Dam opened a trading academy to teach Main Street folks to turn a profit in the stock market, the commodity market, and the currency market. Both the academy and the online academy organize material into five modules based on the basic principles of successful trading: idea generation, company analysis, chart analysis, trading psychology, and risk management. Through these modules, aspiring marketeers learn to make savvy trades based on a deep understanding of the market, rather than from newspaper predictions or company horoscopes. The company-evaluation module, for instance, reveals which financial numbers matter and which are irrelevant, and trading psychology teaches students to remain levelheaded while making decisions.

Lex van Dam learned how to ride the waves of the free market during his time at Goldman Sachs and as a hedge-fund manager himself. He taught a group of novices to out-trade pros on BBC's Million Dollar Traders, a reality show that turned ordinary people into market wizards and insufferably smug Monopoly players.