How to Use the Academy

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

1. Name the three pillars of the Prosper Academy.
2. Describe the 12-school path and why it is ordered the way it is.
3. Navigate any course: lesson, pictures, key terms, quiz, checkpoint.
4. Use worksheets and checkpoints to track your own progress.
5. Read the Market Climate Dashboard and state what it is for.
6. State the Academy's conduct expectations — and its limits.

The Academy is built on three pillars:

• Make money — earning more: careers, skills, and side income.
• Save money — budgeting, cutting waste, and keeping what you earn.
• Invest money — putting your savings to work: markets, retirement, and trading.

Everything here is free while the library is being built. The Academy opens in full at launch, and the material stays free until there is a real library worth charging for. Nobody is asked to pay for a promise.

The curriculum is a path, and the order is deliberate:

• School 0 — Orientation. You are here. One lesson.
• Schools 1–2 — Make it and keep it. Money foundations, earning more.
• Schools 3–4 — Grow it. Investing foundations, security analysis and portfolio design.
• Schools 5–6 — Understand it. Retirement and long-term planning, and the Market Climate Lab.
• Schools 8–9 — Trade it, carefully. Trading foundations and options — the

gateway skills, taught risk-first.

• Bonus and Retirement Basics. Standalone tracks you can take any time.

Go in order. The path is designed so that every school assumes you finished the one before it. Skipping ahead to active trading without the foundations is how accounts get destroyed — which is exactly why the trading schools sit at the end, not the beginning.

Every course in the Academy has the same five parts:

1. The lesson — study-guide text, written plainly. This is the core.
2. Pictures — diagrams and illustrations that show what words cannot.
3. Key terms — the vocabulary of the lesson, defined in one place.
4. The quiz — a short test. Pass it cold before you move on.
5. The checkpoint — a worksheet or exercise that makes you use the lesson.

Courses launch text-first: the written guide, pictures, and quiz come first. Videos are added inside the courses over time as production ramps up. At least one video a week doubles as course material, so the public channel and the Academy grow together.

Most lessons end with something to do, not just something to read: build the budget, run the compound-interest math, size the position. Do the work yourself — reading about a budget never built anyone's savings.

Keep everything in one place: a binder, a notebook, or a folder on your computer. This becomes your personal manual. The rule is simple: do not move on until you can pass the quiz cold and explain the lesson in your own words. Speed means nothing here; retention means everything.

The Academy has its own weather station: the Market Climate Dashboard. It answers one question — what kind of market weather are we in? — using two reads:

• Expected earnings-growth direction — is expected growth expanding or shrinking?
• Trailing-EPS momentum — is the rate of earnings growth accelerating or decelerating?

Understand this clearly: the dashboard is a money-management tool for investing and longer-term swing trading. It tells you when conditions favor leaning into risk and when they favor caution. It is not a day-trading signal. Check it weekly, alongside the Market Climate Report video.

• Go in order. The curriculum is sequenced for a reason.
• Master one thing at a time. One strategy, learned deeply, beats ten strategies

skimmed. You will hear this again.

• No hype, no guarantees. Anyone promising guaranteed returns — in markets or in

education — is someone to walk away from. (School 8 opens with Trading Safety First for exactly this reason.)

• Community comes later. For now, it is you and the material. Discussion

features arrive after launch.

This Academy is a classroom, not a trading desk. No strategy taught here guarantees profit, and none guarantees passing a prop-firm evaluation. Trading and investing involve real risk, including the loss of principal.

School 1 is Money Foundations — starting with Know Your Numbers (MF-101), then How to Make a Budget (MF-102). Bring a notebook.