12 Best YouTube Finance Channels
Finance YouTube is divided into 'sell you the dream' creators and 'teach you something' creators. The first group has bigger audiences. The second group is the one worth watching. Here are twelve channels that genuinely add to how you think about money, markets, and investing.
Finance YouTube splits cleanly into two categories. The first is creators selling courses, trading signals, dropshipping playbooks, and crypto picks. They have the bigger audiences and the more aggressive thumbnails. The second category is creators who explain how things actually work: market structure, valuation, behavioral finance, macroeconomic forces. They have smaller audiences and dramatically more useful content. The list below is from the second category, the channels that actually teach something. Subscribe count isn't the metric I'm using; I'm using whether watching their videos for a year would meaningfully change how you think about money.
The Heavy Hitters
Patrick Boyle. Former hedge fund manager, current finance professor at King's College London. Boyle's videos are dry, well-sourced, and consistently the most informative content on YouTube about market structure, hedge fund history, and financial regulation. The comedy is bone-dry but real. Start with his videos on Long-Term Capital Management or the GameStop saga.
Plain Bagel. Run by Richard Coffin, a CFA charterholder. The channel covers fundamentals (DCF, ratio analysis, fund structures) at a level that's accessible without being dumbed down. Coffin's piece on how value investing works is as good a 20-minute explanation of the topic as exists anywhere.
Aswath Damodaran. Stern School professor, the most-cited valuation academic alive. Damodaran's channel is the lectures and updates from his MBA course on valuation. It's not slick, it's not produced for entertainment, and it's the closest thing to a free graduate course in valuation that exists on the internet. His annual sector-by-sector valuation updates alone are worth following the channel for.
Ben Felix (Common Sense Investing). Portfolio manager at PWL Capital. Felix's channel is heavily focused on academic finance: factor investing, the Fama-French model, market efficiency, the case for and against stock picking. Every video is grounded in published research with citations on screen. The content is the strongest counterargument to active stock picking on YouTube.
The Macro and Markets Set
Money & Macro. Joeri Schasfoort's channel covers macroeconomics, monetary policy, and the history of financial crises. Schasfoort's series on Modern Monetary Theory is among the most balanced explanations of MMT available, presenting both the framework and its critics fairly.
Real Vision. Long-form interviews with hedge fund managers, central bankers, and economists. The free YouTube content is meaningful, the paid platform behind it is more so. The Raoul Pal interviews with various macro thinkers are particularly worth the time.
Bloomberg Quicktake / Bloomberg Markets. Mainstream financial journalism. Not as deep as the others on this list, but useful for daily market context and well-edited explainers on news events.
The Personal Finance and Practical Investing Set
The Plain Bagel already covered above does double duty here too: Coffin's videos on personal finance topics (asset allocation, tax-loss harvesting, retirement accounts) are as solid as his market-structure content.
Two Cents. PBS-produced channel hosted by Philip Olson and Julia Lorenz-Olson. The content skews younger and more behavioral: budgeting, spending psychology, financial decisions in life transitions. It's the channel to recommend to a friend who's never thought about personal finance before.
The Money Guy Show. Brian Preston and Bo Hanson, both CPAs, walk through the practical mechanics of building wealth across the income spectrum. Less focused on markets, more on saving rates, retirement account optimization, and tax strategy. Particularly useful for the high-earning professional who's never sat down with a financial planner.
The Specialists
Bionic Turtle. David Harper, FRM-certified. The channel is a deep technical dive into financial risk management, derivatives pricing, and the math behind quantitative finance. Most people watching it are studying for the FRM exam, but the content stands on its own as the best free resource on YouTube for the math of finance.
Coffeezilla. Stephen Findeisen, investigative journalist. His specialty is exposing the "guru" ecosystem on YouTube and Instagram: course-selling get-rich-quick schemes, crypto pump-and-dump operations, and the worst of the parasocial finance grift. Watching Coffeezilla as an antidote to the rest of finance YouTube is genuinely valuable for calibrating your bullshit detector.
The Honest Take
Twelve channels is a lot. Picking three to start with, I'd recommend Patrick Boyle (for market context), Plain Bagel (for fundamentals), and Ben Felix (for portfolio theory). Those three together cover most of what a serious individual investor needs to understand to make smart decisions, and the time investment is realistic: 30 to 60 minutes a week of viewing, spread across the three channels.
The bigger lesson, if you take only one: the YouTube finance ecosystem rewards confidence and showmanship more than substance. The channels with the biggest audiences are usually selling something other than information. The channels worth following are the ones where the host shows their math, cites their sources, and doesn't try to convert your attention into a course sale at the end of every video. Use that filter and the noise drops dramatically.
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Tech Talk News Editorial
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