Books on finance/investing?

phuriku
Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:37:17 +0000

The Intelligent Investor is an interesting read, but probably not a good introduction to finance in general - it’s more of a guide to value investing, and is actually more of a book that tries to convince that value investing is the best way to invest rather than showing you actually how to do it. That being said, if value investing seems like a path you’re interested in (and it should; it’s one of the only good ways to invest), reading the Intelligent Investor followed by Security Analysis is a good start.

If you’re actually interested in how the mechanics of finance works, you’re kind of going to need a deep math background first. That requires a good probability theory course as well as a real/complex analysis background (ideally at the graduate level). Then you can start learning about the elements of securities pricing. Before that, you might just want to look into how to read balance sheets; in that case, Khan Academy is a good resource (or any decent text on Accounting).