We Built the Investing Reference We Wish Existed. And It's Free.
2,000+ concepts, real case studies, Excel models, formula sheets, and free tools. No sign-up, no paywall. Here's why we did it, and how to actually use it.
Dear Substack Community,
The IWP team is really excited to share iwpfinance.com with you. It’s a free investing knowledge base. No sign-up. No paywall. No catch
We made this because we believe financial education should be widely available, accessible, and free to use. It includes over 2,000 financial concepts from beginner to advanced, 200 case studies spanning the biggest and wildest events in the industry, and a handful of tools and resources which include free calculators, excel models, and formula sheets.
The database is backed with our 35+ years of combined market experience as financial analysts, traders, portfolio managers, advisors, CIOs, and CFOs. We’ve written the research, run the risks, advised many HNW clients, and even made portfolio decisions for multi-million dollar funds.
Financial education online isn’t the most efficient thing. The good and helpful stuff is locked behind courses and subscriptions. The free stuff is either too shallow to be useful or too technical to be readable. And lately there’s a third problem: a rising tide of AI-generated filler, confidently written, subtly wrong, and built for monetization rather than education.
We believe the foundation should be free. Not a watered-down teaser for the thing we’re really selling. The actual, complete, plain-English explanations, written by people who invest for a living.
That’s what iwpfinance.com is.
What’s inside
2,000+ concepts, organized so you can actually learn
The library is structured the way a curriculum should be, sorted into the sections and topics that actually make up investing:
Markets & Macro (rates, inflation, the business cycle, what central banks really do)
Behavioral Finance (the biases that quietly cost you money, and how to catch them)
Analysis & Valuation (reading financial statements, DCF, multiples)
Portfolio Management (allocation, diversification, correlation, rebalancing)
Risk (position sizing, drawdowns, tail risk, hedging)
Technical Analysis & Trading (chart patterns, indicators, signals)
Instruments (equities, fixed income, options, crypto, alternatives)
Financial Modeling & Market Structure (how the machinery actually works under the hood)
And every concept is tagged by difficulty, from beginner to advanced, so you’re never in over your head, and never bored. Start with “what is a stock” and work your way up to convexity, implied volatility, and cross-currency basis swaps at your own pace. Each explanation is plain-English, cross-linked to related ideas, and honest about the tradeoffs, because the tradeoffs are usually the whole point.
Real case studies and lessons to be learned:
History is the cheapest tuition in finance. Someone already made the expensive mistake, so you don’t have to. We break down the market’s biggest wins and its most spectacular blowups, and we tie each one back to the concept that explains it:
Barings, where a single 28-year-old trader hid losses in a secret account and sank a 233-year-old bank in a matter of weeks. Read it next to operational risk and segregation of duties.
LTCM, where two Nobel laureates and a fund that “couldn’t lose” lost $4.6 billion in four months. Read it next to leverage, value at risk, and tail risk.
Enron, the accounting mirage that fooled Wall Street for years. Read it next to forensic accounting and mark-to-market.
Wirecard and Theranos, two frauds hiding in plain sight, and the red flags that were visible the entire time to anyone who knew what to look for.
Tulip mania, the dot-com bubble, and the 2021 crypto mania: three manias, centuries apart, running on the exact same human wiring. Read them next to behavioral finance, herding, and the greater-fool theory.
The 2021 meme-stock squeeze, where market structure itself became the story. Read it next to short squeezes, gamma, and liquidity.
That’s the entire point of the site in one sentence: you don’t just read that leverage is dangerous. You watch it vaporize a multi-billion-dollar fund run by geniuses, then go model it yourself.
Free tools and calculators for all uses:
Every one is interactive, and the numbers you type never leave your browser.
Portfolio Builder: assemble a model portfolio and watch its allocation, blended expected return, and risk update live as you shift the weights around.
Affordability Calculator: enter your income, expenses, debts, and savings, and find out whether you can genuinely afford a house, car, or any big purchase, plus the two ratios a lender checks before they say yes.
Compound Interest Calculator: watch how regular contributions and compounding grow a balance over time, year by year. The single clearest way to feel why starting early beats saving more later.
FIRE Calculator: find your financial-independence number, and how many years it takes to reach it, based on what you save, what you spend, and what you earn on it.
Position Size Calculator: turn a stop-loss and the share of your account you’re willing to risk into the exact number of shares to buy. Risk management, handled before you ever enter the trade.
Options Payoff Calculator: build any strategy, from a single call to a multi-leg spread, and see the full profit-and-loss diagram, max gain, max loss, and break-even points at a glance.
Downloadable models, templates, and cheat sheets:
This is where the site earns a permanent spot in your bookmarks bar.
A finance formula sheet: 100 formulas across 11 sections, each with a plain-English note and a difficulty level. If you’re studying for the CFA, sitting a finance or MBA course, or prepping for interviews, this is the one clean reference you keep open instead of ten browser tabs. From time value of money to option pricing, it’s all there, organized and explained.
An options Greeks cheat sheet: delta, gamma, theta, vega, and rho, demystified on a single page you’ll actually reference.
Excel models you can put to work today: a DCF valuation model and financial model templates. Plug in your own numbers, change the assumptions, and watch the output move. No black boxes, no locked cells, nothing to reverse-engineer.
All free. All yours to download and keep.
It’s all connected
This is the part we’re proudest of, and it’s the thing generic “investing 101” sites never manage to do. Nothing here is an island.
Read about leverage, and one click away is the LTCM story showing exactly how it turns a “risk-free” trade into a crater. Learn what a stop-loss is, then size one properly in the position calculator. Study a DCF, then open the Excel model and build one line by line. Read about behavioral biases, then watch them play out across three centuries of bubbles in the case-study library.
Concepts link to case studies. Case studies link to the tools. The tools link back to the concepts and to the formula sheet. You learn the idea, you watch it work and break in the real world, and then you do the math yourself. That loop, understand it, see it, apply it, is how knowledge actually sticks instead of evaporating by next week.
Why give it away?
This is the type of content most people would seek to monetize through upsells, paywalls, subscriptions, and limit on uses.
For us, we make our living from research. The free knowledge base isn’t the product we’re monetizing. It’s the foundation everything else stands on. We would rather earn your trust by being genuinely useful for free than rent it with a paywall around the basics.
This isn’t a finished product we’re going to leave to gather dust. We’re gonna keep adding concepts, case studies, tools, and downloadable content as we go. The library will get deeper every month, the cross-links will get richer, and the case studies will keep expanding as the markets keep handing us new lessons.
You know we have skin in the game and only publish research here we are willing to back with our own capital. Now, we’re applying that confidence to education and tools.
How this fits with what we do here
Think of it as two halves of the same idea:
iwpfinance.com is where you learn. Free, forever, no sign-up. The concepts, the history, the models, the tools.
This Substack is where we apply it. Our real research, our actual trade setups with entry, exit, and risk, our portfolio thinking, in real time, with our own money alongside yours.
Learn the concept for free. Then watch us put it to work.
Start here
Go have a look. A few good places to begin, depending on where you are:
New to all of it? Start with the Knowledge Paths and go from beginner to advanced in order.
Want a story? Read a case study and see how the biggest names in finance blew up, and what to take from it.
Studying or modeling? Grab the formula sheet and the Excel templates.
Here to do the math? Try the free calculators.
Just browsing? The glossary has every term, A to Z.
It’s free. It always will be. No email required to read a single word of it.
And if you want the research that comes next, the trade plans and analysis we run with our own capital, you’re already in the right place. Stay subscribed.
Master the markets. Invest with purpose.
The IWP Team
iwpfinance.com is free and educational. Nothing here or there is financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any security.