Easy (?) free stuff from Morningstar

[ttw22]

Morningstar has a "classroom" section on their website where you can read about different types of investments, then take a short quiz after each section and earn a maximum of 5 credits per quiz. Each credit is worth about 10¢ (assuming you use it on a Premium Membership) towards picking out an item or two from their little selection. I calculate that the maximum number of credits possible should be around 850. The items are:
300 - Stainless Steel Travel Tumbler
400 - The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing (book)
400 - Morningstar Funds 500 (book)
400 - Morningstar Stocks 500 (book)
650 - White Cotton T-Shirt (A little overpriced, eh?)
650 - Six month Morningstar.com Premium Membership
800 - One-year subscription to Morningstar FundInvestor
800 - One-year subscription to Morningstar StockInvestor

I'm just finishing up with the Stock 100 series, so I've got a ways to go, but this looks like it would be a great way for novices to learn about investing, and for people who already know this, I would think it would be pretty easy to pick up a free item or two by breezing through the quizzes.

I am not affilliated with Morningstar and all that jazz. Just thought some people would appreciate this.

[Sniper]

Morningstar is an excellent resource for mutual fund evaluations and many online brokerages provide their research (or its equivalent) as a free resource.

How much time do you estimate it will take you to go thru all the lessons/quizzes?

[ttw22]

In my experience, each lesson takes 2-5 minutes to read, and each test takes maybe 30 seconds (plus another 30 to navigate onto the next one, and so on.) That should work out to something like 2.8 hours to just do all of the quizzes, based on my very rough estimate.

[Sniper]

3 hrs of education for 6 months of their premium service (roughly $60 value) sounds like a good investment! /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[ttw22]

That's 3 hours if you already know this stuff and just do the quizzes, or if you don't know it and go back every time you miss one. Multiply the time by 4 or so if you go through the lessons too. You don't need all the points for the premium subscription, so that can take off a few hours.

Even if you're just doing quizzes, you'd still get a higher hourly rate three-tabling one of the Crypto hourly bonuses, but I digress. This is a little less annoying than Crypto's slow software, at least.

[Sniper]

Wasn't really comparing the time value to poker playing time, but if the education you receive by going thru the lessons/quizes adds even 1% to your annual returns over your lifetime, the value is worth much more than a few hours of poker.