Learning to Trade in the Age of Agents

Hi all! I just joined the community and I had some questions after looking around and doing some good faith research on my own. If this question is unwelcome here or is better addressed in a different subreddit, please let me know and I'll remove this and repost.

TLDR – For someone with a strong technical background who is just getting into trading in 2026 – beyond generic search result style answers – if you were mentoring them, what would you teach them? What would you point them to or share with them and why?

For a little background, I'm one of those Big Tech/FAANG Cloud Security Engineers turned AI Architect – I know… I know… boo-hiss – we're definitely part of the problem. Especially since everyone is all in on AI everywhere, all the time, for every workload over the last 6 years. I have built some automation/classification/prediction solutions all up and down the ML/DL/GenAI space while working with some of the largest enterprise customers on the planet, including with regulated Financial & FinTech outfits. Most of security at any serious level winds up being boring statistical analysis and anomaly detection anyways, which leads into…

I'm looking at finally-maybe-sorta-kinda putting some of these skills to use building some non-security related things and I'm interested in finance/FinTech solutions, prediction engines, trading automations and such. I know that I have killer, world-class security/cloud/AI engineering expertise… but I am also blessed(cursed?) with the self awareness to know that I know very little about how participating in modern finance works. Especially so when compared to working down in the trenches with what must be a pretty dynamic domain during this wonderful "AI Summer" we're all enjoying…. /sarcasm.

I've been doing some reading around what seems to be traditional/typical "learning to trade for beginners in 2026" trajectories and learning paths. Unsurprisingly, I'm seeing a lot of "zero-to-hero trading" or "2026 markets in 12 weeks" crash courses that seem to all be rehashed, low-effort AI slop or predatory online learning plays attempting to extract quick cash from folks who ought to know better and don't.

However, there seem to be huge opportunities everywhere, from the vanilla incremental gains in intraday trading patterns to 24/7 global crypto trading to selling signal from AI-powered information disparity to sentiment analysis in the weird emergent predictive markets… It seems like there's just a lot of opportunity to triage, digest, and figure out where to get started. Before settling in to learn the ropes, I thought I'd ask some folks who are already participating in the system above and beyond "I maxed out my IRA contributions". So… all that is to say, my question for this sub is this:

If you were mentoring a buddy with a technical background who is just getting into the world of investing & finance, what would you teach them and why?

Fast follow-on questions would be:

• What order would you recommend they learn that material in?
• Why that order?
• Why those items/topics/techniques?
• Why those sources/books/mentors/courses?
• Is this wisdom or knowledge?
• Directly learned/observed or third-hand/institutional experience?

Assuming they had already made a good-faith effort to research investing fundamentals on their own, had done extensive open-source research such google searching, public libraries, read a few books already, etc.

Thanks in advance to anyone who made it this far through my coke-baby, fever-dream, stream-of-consciousness, word-vomit diatribe. You're the real ones. <3