Most people are responding to the trading-related side of the coin, so I'll offer some advice on analyzing a market for the purpose of building a startup.
It's quite hard to find good resources on the internet for this purpose; what helped me was scouring Wikipedia [1] for the buzzwords (check out 'see also') and searching on Google if necessary beyond that. There's also lots of free lectures from places like KhanAcademy or Coursera that likely cover these parts of business.
One small tip my cofounder learned in business school: I don't remember the exact terminology, but analyses that go from the inside outwards are more respected by investors than ones that go from the outside inwards. Don't take huge figures like "Number of Americans" and multiply by "Percent of Americans that do 'x'", but rather find localized, small figures, and extrapolate those up/outwards.
It's quite hard to find good resources on the internet for this purpose; what helped me was scouring Wikipedia [1] for the buzzwords (check out 'see also') and searching on Google if necessary beyond that. There's also lots of free lectures from places like KhanAcademy or Coursera that likely cover these parts of business.
One small tip my cofounder learned in business school: I don't remember the exact terminology, but analyses that go from the inside outwards are more respected by investors than ones that go from the outside inwards. Don't take huge figures like "Number of Americans" and multiply by "Percent of Americans that do 'x'", but rather find localized, small figures, and extrapolate those up/outwards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_addressable_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_segmentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_market