The Best Finance YouTube Channels

THE FINANCE CHANNELS WORTH YOUR SUBSCRIPTION

Too much of finance YouTube is someone selling you a course or shouting at a candlestick chart. These twelve are the exceptions — The Plain Bagel, Ben Felix, and Patrick Boyle on how markets actually work, Aswath Damodaran teaching valuation the way NYU teaches it, Graham Stephan and The Money Guy Show on personal finance, Economics Explained for the context underneath it all — grouped by the layer of your financial life each one covers.

THE 30-SECOND VERSION

1. Markets without the hype: The Plain Bagel, Ben Felix, Patrick Boyle — how investing actually works
2. Personal finance that holds up: Graham Stephan, The Money Guy Show, Two Cents, Andrei Jikh
3. Economics and context: Economics Explained, New Money, Meet Kevin, The Swedish Investor
4. Valuation properly: Aswath Damodaran — the professor, not the pundit
5. The catch: twelve channels is a full-time feed — how investors actually keep up

FOR MARKETS WITHOUT THE HYPE

The layer most people actually need: how markets work, what the evidence says, and a working skepticism toward everything else.

1. THE PLAIN BAGEL

Best for: understanding financial concepts without being sold anything. Run by Richard Coffin, a CFA and investment analyst, The Plain Bagel is the most balanced channel in finance YouTube. He explains concepts, market events, and investment products plainly — including which popular ones don’t hold up. His videos on why hedge funds underperform and what index funds actually do are the standard references. If you watch one channel from this list, make it this one.

2. BEN FELIX

Best for: evidence-based investing, straight from a portfolio manager. Ben Felix is a portfolio manager and chief investment officer at PWL Capital, and his channel translates academic finance research into decisions actual investors face. He’ll tell you when a popular strategy has no evidence behind it, cite the papers, and change his position when the evidence says so — a rarity. His Rational Reminder podcast goes deeper for those who want it. No stock tips, ever.

3. PATRICK BOYLE

Best for: market events, macro, and financial nonsense, treated with dry wit. A former hedge fund manager who teaches finance, Boyle covers market moves, scams, and economic stories with genuine expertise and a deadpan delivery. His videos on frauds and bubbles are minor masterpieces of clear explanation. The pace is slower and denser than most of YouTube — that’s the point, and it rewards the attention.

FOR PERSONAL FINANCE THAT HOLDS UP

Budgeting, saving, house questions, retirement math — the layer where small good decisions compound.

4. GRAHAM STEPHAN

Best for: energetic, accessible personal finance with a real-estate streak. One of the biggest personal finance channels on the platform, Graham Stephan covers saving, investing, credit cards, and real estate with a polished, fast-cut style. The content is solid mainstream advice; the tone is entertainment-adjacent, which makes it easy watching. Best if you want motivation with your information.

5. THE MONEY GUY SHOW

Best for: structured financial planning, from two actual planners. Hosted by Brian Preston (CPA, CFP) and Bo Hanson (CFA, CFP), this is the closest thing to a financial planning practice on YouTube. Their “Financial Order of Operations” framework — what to do with the next dollar, in what sequence — is genuinely useful, and they go deeper on taxes and retirement math than most. US-centric, and proudly so.

6. TWO CENTS

Best for: absolute beginners, in short, friendly episodes. PBS’s personal finance channel covers the basics — budgeting, debt, credit, why saving is hard — in tight ten-minute videos with warm production. If terms like “expense ratio” mean nothing to you yet, this is the gentlest possible on-ramp. You’ll outgrow it, and that’s the design.

7. ANDREI JIKH

Best for: dividend and index investing with full portfolio transparency. Jikh films his own portfolio and thought process, which almost nobody does, and his production is among the slickest in the niche. The analysis is lighter than Felix or Coffin — this is inspiration and habit-building more than depth. Good companion watching, not a primary source.

FOR ECONOMICS AND CONTEXT

The macro layer: why the world around your money behaves the way it does.

8. ECONOMICS EXPLAINED

Best for: country-scale economics, made watchable. Each video takes one economy or macro question — why a country boomed, what a debt crisis actually is — and explains it with clear structure and decent depth. It’s broad-brush by necessity, and occasionally simplified past strict accuracy, but as context for market news it’s unbeatable value per minute.

9. NEW MONEY

Best for: companies and wealth, explained without worship. Brandon van der Kolk breaks down how famous companies and fortunes actually work — revenue models, competitive moats, the decisions behind the headlines. Accessible business literacy, well-paced. Pairs well with the markets layer above.

10. MEET KEVIN

Best for: high-volume markets and real-estate commentary, if you filter. Kevin Paffrath covers market news, real estate, and macro events at a pace and energy level that borders on overwhelming. There’s real knowledge in there, particularly on real estate, but it’s wrapped in volume and hot takes. Watch selectively; don’t let it set your mood about the market.

FOR VALUATION PROPERLY

11. ASWATH DAMODARAN

Best for: learning to value companies from the person who teaches it. The NYU Stern professor known as the “Dean of Valuation” posts full lectures and his annual valuation classes — intrinsic valuation, narratives, risk. Zero production polish, maximum substance. If you want to understand what a stock is actually worth and why, this is the deepest free resource in existence. Dense, and worth every minute.

12. THE SWEDISH INVESTOR

Best for: absorbing the investing canon, cheaply. Animated, faithful summaries of the classic investing and money books — Bogle, Graham, Zweig, the psychology shelf. You still get more from reading the book, but for coverage of a canon too large to read entirely, nothing beats it. A sensible way to find out which of the classics deserves your full read.

THE CATCH: THAT’S A LOT OF WATCHING

Here’s the honest math. These twelve channels together upload several times a week, many videos run past twenty minutes, and finance content decays faster than most — last month’s market narrative is this month’s trivia. Watch everything raw and you’re spending hours a week on material that’s mostly skippable, while the few videos that matter (a Felix evidence review, a Boyle fraud breakdown, a Damodaran valuation) get buried in the queue.

That’s the exact problem DailyTube solves for investors. Add the channels you trust, and every new upload arrives as a written summary in one daily brief — the argument, the numbers, a link back to the exact source moment for anything you want to verify. You read the day’s finance in a few minutes on Telegram, email, browser notification, or a webhook. Quiet markets send nothing, which is itself useful information. There’s more on the investor setup here, and the free tool — three digests a day, up to ten links each, no signup — is at daily-tube.com/summarize if you want to judge the output first.

One caveat that belongs on any honest finance list: nothing here is personal advice. These channels are how you learn how investing works; your own numbers are how you decide what to do.