a few things:
1. how deep did his finance education go? did he learn to code in matlab or R? can he correctly backtest strategies/use out of sample data to test in sample results? if not, i'd highly recommend learning R. it's really not that hard and will be super useful in testing strategies once he's gotten this far.
2. from the tone and verbiage in this thread it seems he's 100% equity focused? it's useful to learn about hedging strategies, especially if he's going to be trading EM stocks. if it's solely a small/mid cap domestic fund, then ignore this.
3. given the OP and where we are in finance now, i'm assuming at the very least he can backtest to check for stop losses on a given trade, assess portfolio risk as a whole, and check his results logically? if so that at least is a good start. be sure he always knows what he can expect to lose on a 1sd day, a 2sd day, and if the world falls apart. many people have made HUGE mistakes planning for "the worst" when "the worst" is a 1sd day.
4. i'd recommend realllllllllly learning interest rates hardcore first. this was the most important lesson i learned for sure in overall understanding of markets. learn them inside and out including (especially) bonds and bond pricing, interest rate swaps, interest rate futures pricing, eurodollar markets, and benchmarks (which comes with the swaps, but LIBOR, EURIBOR, etc.). it's SO much easier to get a picture of what is priced in if you can look at the eurodollar curve (be able to take this table and create a nice yield curve:
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/inte...s_futures.html). also be able to fully understand fed funds futures and everything in this recap:
http://www.cmegroup.com/education/20...03_rates_recap
5. when building a portfolio, diff bets are great. they can add value with little additional volatility since they're usually uncorrelated to directional bets (but as i learned the hard way, they can be correlated with specific sectors so be sure to test this too), which i'm guessing will be most of the portfolio if not all initially (here i mean taking two or more similar companies in a sector and going long one group and short the other group. this takes a little practice and knowledge in terms of how many shares of each to buy or short, but it's not too hard to learn).
so for example, one bet i made a few years ago was xlp/xly (consumer staples vs. consumer discretionary etfs); however, instead of just buying some of xlp and shorting some of xly, i recreated them. i.e. they've since fixed it but a while back, they had weird stocks in xlp (like louis voitton (sp?), which is clearly a luxury good imo), and weird stocks in xly (walmart used to be here for example). so i did research and chose 5 stocks to long and 5 stocks to short, built out the 2 indices, and created my diff bet. it ended up doing well, however, i overestimated how uncorrelated it would be with some directional bets. so even here i made a mistake and i shouldn't have made what i did on the bet. that's a useful lesson b/c it can easily go the other way (i could have lost more than i intended due to not fully thinking appreciating the correlation. i should have tested it more thoroughly).
6. the above example goes to show that no matter WHAT you do and HOW HARD you try to avoid it, mistakes will be made. i repeat. MISTAKES. WILL. BE. MADE. the key is to learn from them, get better at what he does every day, and be sure not to get too down on himself.
7. ********READ******** no joke. read everything. FT.com, economist.com, bloomberg.com, wsj.com, and find a few blogs (zero hedge, for example) and read and think about those writings. i can't tell you how many trade ideas i got from thinking about an article i read (the xly/xlp diff bet came from an article in the economist that had nothing to do with it). read the economist cover to cover. i know the stuff about latin america and russia can get boring, but being knowledgeable is really the best advice out there. you need to make sure he knows what's going on in the world at all times. the subscriptions to these huge sources of information online cost NOTHING. it's seriously pennies compared to how much value can be gained from them.
that's all for now. if i think of anything else i'll add it here. i will say #6 is huge imo. also #4 is big, at least it was for me. it helps with everything (choosing discount rates, understanding futures, understanding bonds, understanding options, everything). i'd say the most important classes i got to take (luckily b/c my former job allowed me to pass out of classes and create about 25% of courses of my own choosing as an MBA) were the derivative pricing courses, which were based heavily on interest rate maths and models.
that said, if he's ONLY ever going to focus on stocks, he doesn't have to go THAT deep into interest rates. i guess i just find it super interesting and insanely useful. but the reading thing he just has to do. like constantly. every morning read it all.