What are /r/finance's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Bad Blood, it's by the WSJ reporter that broke the original story.

The craziest parts are about how blatantly she was lying, as well as about how absolutely batshit the "Sunny" guy is. There were so many red flags internally, but they threw millions at intimidating former employees.

How seriously are you going to take this? If the answer is "seriously", then Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor is a pretty good follow up if you've already read A Random Walk.

Aim for a broader education, going beyond just technical skills. Read economic and financial history books. Understand the history, crises, limitations of your field. Gary Gorton's excellent Maze of Banking for instance. Robert Schiller, Barry Eichengreen, Perry Mehrling - they all write accessible and interesting books and are at the top of their field. Your university's library will stock them.

If anyone is interested in more reasons for a bearish sentiment on China, look into how they are categorising their non-performing loans.

In most of western countries loans are deemed to be "non-performing" when the loan holders don't make their scheduled payments after a certain period of time.

However in China a loan is deemed to be non-performing when the payments stop AND the market price of the underlying asset which was bought using the loan falls below the total value of the loan.

This is most applicable in real estate - where massive amounts of toxic loans are not categorised as such because the market price for the underlying assets keeps inflating. Some time ago I read a report by PWC, which estimated that because of these mechanisms a 15-20% drop in real estate prices could collapse their entire economy.

In other estimates China's toxic loans could exceed 5 trillion dollars.

This sub is increasingly becoming another outlet for the mob meme stock traders of wsb, superstonk, or whatever new sub they're in now. The amount of misinformation has increased and the majority of people seem to have such a black and white view of topics (e.g. PFOF is good or PFOF is bad) which just screams having a very shallow understanding of the topic being discussed.

PFOF for the vast majority of retail investors makes trading cheaper. Unless you're trading size in your PA, you're certainly saving more on the small price discrepancy some HFT is making off your odd lot of shares than the old flat 5-10 dollar per trade model. At the same time, I realize that with current best execution rules, the money is made when the HFT that the trades are being routed to offer better than NBBO... which is incredibly common. Plenty of places publish at least some form of rudimentary data on how often they have "price improvement" (which has it's own issues, the rules around what constitutes price improvement aren't great - once again nothing is black/white) like here and the numbers are staggering. There's improvement like 99+% of the time on SPX names which simply suggests there's tons of hidden liquidity in the dark pools.

This leads to the question of why isn't there a greater push of adding more clarity and adding more enforcement behind what can be consider NBBO and how much liquidity can be hidden away to be accessed by HFTs. While connected, I think this can be a better way of dealing with the PFOF issues at hand instead of targeting something that seems to benefit the small guy for once.

I am going to roughly quote Daniel Kahneman from his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We are essentially trying to find a cause and effect relationship where none might exist. Chances are the stock market would have grown regardless of who took control of the ship. Like Warren Buffet, and many others...I am bullish when it comes to the U.S. economy in general.

Normal daily and weekly fluctuations don't require an explanation.

> In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them. We have limited information about what happened on a day, and System 1 is adept at finding a coherent causal story that links the fragments of knowledge at its disposal

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

First, put Rich Dad, Poor Dad back in the garbage bag.

As for the rest, I recommend Stocks for the Long Run, but I still think you would be better served by The Intelligent Investor if you are looking to spend some time reading financial literature (assuming, of course, that you haven't already read Graham's classic.)

For ya'll stuck behind the paywall... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-firefox/

There's a Chrome version on Github as well: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Investment Banking: Valuation, Leveraged Buyouts, and Mergers and Acquisitions

https://www.amazon.com/Investment-Banking-Valuation-Leveraged-Acquisitions/dp/1118656210/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=investment+banking&qid=1561568574&s=gateway&sprefix=investment&sr=8-2

Personally, I'd start with 2. It really starts with the basics of market mechanics and how stocks work. The Intelligent Investor is a seminal text, but A Random Walk will probably provide some useful context.

Wow I've got beef with this article. There is a definition: When 50% or more of the revenue is generated downline and not through external accounts a company can legally be defined as a pyramid scheme. This article obviously has done absolutely no research into the matter, just highlighted that the FTC can't comment and that the company doesn't think it's a pyramid scheme. There are definitely different companies in the MLM space and not all of them are pyramid schemes because THEY ALL TRACK THIS NUMBER AND IT IS ALWAYS IN EXCESS OF 50%. The ones who don't? Just HLF.

I like this article - it rings true 2 years later:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1078321-is-ackmans-hatchet-job-on-herbalife-justified

Thanks for this article from the NYT, but the research into it was pathetic.

It's been years -- decades, really -- since I read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." But as I recall the efficient market hypothesis posits that current prices reflect all the information about the market, and that it's impossible to beat the market.

Maybe the EMH has been modified; maybe it's more nuanced. But early on I remember thinking that, no, prices do not reflect all the information about the market...prices reflect interpretations of that information. And there's the rub. That's why a Warren Buffett can be so successful: he has the same information, but he interprets it differently.

My advice for books to read would be:

• Buffett's Letters to Berkshire Shareholders
• Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Money Game, Adam Smith
• When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein

Best wishes,

A fellow undergraduate Philosophy guy

Investopedia

Khan Academy Finance

Two very good sources for someone looking to learn. As an aside, I wouldn't worry about the fact that you found it difficult to follow Inside Job; derivatives such as CDOs and CDSs are complex even to experienced investors.

There are no derivatives for diamonds. No futures contracts, etc, like there are for other commodities that come out of the ground. There are a few reasons for this:

• Up until 2000 or so, the diamond trade was run by a single cartel/monopoly that controlled the price
• Diamonds are more of a consumer product than a commodity
• There's no objective standard for pricing diamonds. You could have two diamonds that weigh exactly the same and have the same grade, but one gets a better price because it has a different shape.

People keep trying though: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/forget-gold-diamonds-may-be-the-next-big-thing-in-the-futures-market-2015-08-04

The Japanese equity market tends to move inline with the value of the yen, as Japanese corporate profits are highly export driven. In terms of explaining why the currency has been cheapening, it's because of the much more aggressive inflation targeting that was announced recently.

By Burton G. Malkiel, who is a professor of economics at Princeton University. The 10th edition of his widely read book, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)

I'm not sure I get that--I've used Excel with huge amounts of data and dates, as long as excel recognizes the date, it'll sort it properly. More than likely it's turned off the formatting on that field because you have dates which aren't internally consistent. e.g. series starts with "13/01/15", "13/02/15" (MDY) ... and then "01/13/15" (DMY? DYM? Typo?) ... so what is this date?

Try checking some of the tricks here: http://superuser.com/questions/817110/unable-to-get-excel-to-recognise-date-in-column

Issues I've had:

• Spaces present in beginning

• Malformed dates in the series

• Embedded = or '.

Try this:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Edit: if you use Firefox, it is even easier, as the Firefox extension store already includes this add-on.

"Insider trading" in this context means trades made by the officers ("insiders") of the company, e.g. Bill Gates decides to buy/sell a bunch of MSFT. Such trades must follow pretty strict rules and get reported to the SEC, which then releases the data to the public:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT+Insider+Transactions

Although these trades are not supposed to be based on any non-public info, it does give some information. For example, if the CEO is selling a bunch of shares, he's probably not in possesion of any non public information that would be good for the shares, and vice-versa.

Books:

Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers by Allen B. Downey - complete with exercises in Python

An Introduction to Data Science by Jeffrey M. Stanton, Syracuse University - Exercises in R

Courses:

The famed Machine Learning at Stanford is a great way to learn Octave/Matlab. And there's no reason as to why you can't take the course using Python either.

An Intro to Data Science at the university of Washington, which gives an overview of SQL.

There's obviously quite a lot out there, but that should do for the rest of the year. Let me know if you have any questions.

The share is a unit ownership in the equity of a company. The assets and hence equity increase in value over time for an efficient enterprise. Any acquisition of the company or subsequent public offering takes into account the current market value of the share price. Sal Khan covers it better than I can:

http://www.khanacademy.org/finance-economics/core-finance/v/what-it-means-to-buy-a-company-s-stock

Best source to learn from is Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast morning email.

Here is a link to sign up http://seekingalpha.com/author/wall-street-breakfast

and a link to this mornings http://seekingalpha.com/article/3516566-wall-street-breakfast-fed-decision-day-finally-arrives

Look at Facebook's acquisition history; they have a zero-tolerance policy for potential disruptors. Valuations are too lopsided not to suggest strategic imperatives. Edit: And yes, it has been researched, check out The Innovator's Dilemma.

If people want to see what it is to be a good CEO, they should pick up a copy of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It doesn't really tell you whether CEO's are underpaid or overpaid, but it communicates the difficulty of the position, and the fact that a good/bad CEO can easily make/break an entire company.

This is considered acceptable when you look at historical returns from fund managers. Most will not beat the returns that one would receive from the S&p 500. This is a dirty little secret but it is very true!

Most of these fund managers are under pressure to beat the market and generate higher returns. Most fund managers receive bonuses (quarterly or annually) when they beat the market. This is why most will chase high returns which results in higher risk which ultimately in most cases results in higher losses for their investors.

There are a few that are able to best the s&p over the long run, for example Warren Buffett has seen higher returns. The reason why is because he looks for value and invests for the long run, he doesn't care about short term performance. He will be one of the first to recommend investing in an S&P 500 index fund instead of giving money to fund managers. By investing in a low cost s&p index fund you will experience higher returns compared to fund managers, lower fees and taxes, and in the long run you will have more money!

I was also once a finance student, good luck in your future. There are two books that I will recommend to you that will answer many questions that you might have and will have a significant impact on your understanding of the market and investing. Check out "The Intelligent Investor" and "Stock Analysis" by the one and only Benjamin Graham. He had the biggest impact on Warren Buffet's career and also is by many considered the greatest financial mind of our time.

Having worked as a financial advisor in the past, my honest advice is do not go to a financial advisor. They are salespeople and, like anyone else, are more concerned with how much they are going to make than how much you are going to make.

People pay advisors because they think that advisers must have some special knowledge or power to see the future. They don't. You don't need them and the 1.5% or so they will take as their fee will steadily eat up more and more of your long term returns.

Any reasonably intelligent person can learn to invest successfully for themselves.

Start by reading: 1. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel. 2. The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein 3. 7Twelve: A Diversified Investment Portfolio with a Plan by Craig Israelsen

Check investopedia.com for any terminology you don't understand.

These books will give you a good idea of what investing is, how it works, a bunch of stupid mistakes to avoid, and a solid basis to make a plan that works for you.

Personally I invest in a broadly diversified portfolio of ETFs. Right now I invest mostly in stocks as I am young and unmarried so I can afford to take some risk. It sounds like you are in the same situation.

Good luck!

> I always loved finance history and often read about history crisis in a finance department.

If you like historical accounts then the books in this link are good. "The Smartest Guys in the Room" happens to be on that list.

> Also i am hoping to get job as a stock exchange analyst

If you want to be an equity research analyst, or investment banking analyst, or credit analyst, then you should start with:

Intelligent Investor Security Analysis Best Practices for Equity Research Practitioners Guide to Investment Banking

The Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis, Options Volatility and Pricing, Investments By Bodie, Kane and Marcus

These are all technical books. In order to have an appreciation of modern finance, you must read about history too. The following books may provide for more light reading...

Liar's Poker, The Fall of Long Term Capital Management, Flash Boys

Pm me when u finish these and I'll be more than happy to give u some more of my favorites

Spend your summer reading: "The Intelligent Investor".

Pay special attention to chapters 8 and 20. In fact, if you get bored with it, ENSURE that you read 8 and 20.

Then read this: "Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor".

You are in Reddit, so you know how to read it if you want to.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street Barbarians at the Gate Liar's Poker King of Capital The Big Short No need to even consider CFP or CFA if you don't have a degree/full time job that requires it. They are costly.

Schwab reports on their revenue from POF here: https://www.schwab.com/legal/order-routing-1

Quickly scanning through their 2021Q1 report, their revenue from POF is less than $20M per month, so less than $60M per quarter. In 2021Q1, Schwab had a revenue of $4.71B and a net income of $1.48B. They would still be very profitable without POF.

I think other brokers shifted to commission free trades because of competitive pressure, not because of a breakthrough in a POF market model. Even if POF was banned, retail brokers would probably have a hard time switching to a commission model again because any broker that reintroduced commissions for stock trades would see their retail customers switch to a different broker.

Brokers have other ways of making money from retail customers. Commissions are a very visible cost, so charging commissions is a competitive disadvantage.

IBM is the biggest component of the DJIA. Because the Dow is a price-weighted, stocks with higher numeric prices drive more of the movement. IBM's share price is near $200/share, well above other Dow companies:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cp?s=%5EDJI+Components

OK, so "less transparent in an easily understandable way for less sophisticated consumers".

This isn't an original insight. I'm regurgitating what I learned reading The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives. The author does a good job examining why people use check cashing places when they're so expensive. It turns out that it's not because poor people are stupid. These people feel banks are often opaque and maybe they got burned with a bunch of overdraft fees when a bank ordered their payments to maximize fees. You say neon sign but Lisa Servon compares check cashing places to fast food restaurants. All the services and prices are laid out like a menu. Easy to read, easy to understand.

Check cashing is an $11 billion a year industry in large part because traditional banks do a poor job of serving low income customers. I suspect Walmart will be able to do better with low income folks than either traditional banks or check cashing places.

I would recommend "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. Though it's not a substitute for the CFAI curriculum, the book does cover a lot of ground.

I'd like to take the time to point out that given your lack of experience, the potential employer wont be looking for a very high level of technical expertise. Put in another way, a basic understanding of financial statements might very well suffice. Freshies are generally required to have that along with a good grasp of MS Suite (sans Access).

Thank you for the recommendations, I have Thinking Fast and Slow (4 copies.. I do not know why) and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits as well.

I heard mixed reviews about The Black Swan and would appreciate hearing your opinion on it.

Kiyosaki's a tool, useless. ( Rich Dad, Poor Dad). Pick up Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor first. It will open your eyes to how simple things were and how, in a boiled down sense how simple things still are. It's the best primer... see what Warren Buffet did with a brain and this guy's teachings? You can find it free online if you need to, along with his other books.

The Khan Academy has a huge series on finance (Sal Khan used to work at a hedge fund before he started his magnum opus): http://www.khanacademy.org/#core-finance

Some are pretty basic stuff, but he does have some interesting commentary and snippets of more interesting topics. They're all very low-commitment and bite-sized.

> They use HFT tricks to get the comm down

In fact they sell the flow. That's where they get their money from.

We had a discussion about this at hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357554

Watch The Big Short on Netflix... It's a great movie. It was nominated for best picture and I think it should have won. It does a great job of explaining credit default swaps, CDO's and how the entire financial crisis happened.

EDIT- https://www.netflix.com/search?q=the%20big%20short&jbv=80075560&jbp=0&jbr=0

Lots of stuff on coursera, such as Financial Engineering, Computational Investing. You may also want to check out /r/algotrading, though there is a big R slant there.

Despite what others might tell you it is very possible, but it is also very hard. The hardest part is developing the patience to wait - wait through the red, or stay out of the market and wait until it's a good time to get in again, or sit on green positions and not sell out of fear. I'm one of the top traders on etoro.com, and my returns are publicly available - I've been trading there for 3 years and I've consistently the beat the best indices by huge multiples. After 3 years of compounded returns I'm several hundred percent up.

The first year or so took some time to tweak my approach, but now I have it. A bear market will be harder to play than the bull market we've seen but play it I will.

My Profile

Khan Academy if you haven't checked it out already. http://www.khanacademy.org/#finance

Also Robert Shiller does Open Yale courses in Financial Markets. http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/content/downloads

I can suggest books all over the place, but start with Robert Shiller's lectures. He recommends some good ones. Actually I could recommend his own - Irrational Exuberance.

Good luck to you.

Why would you need a third party? Companies do it all the time in share repurchases if they feel their stock is undervalued by the market. There's nothing wrong with it if it's completely aboveboard and announced ahead of time. A quick example off the top of my head is LDK announcing the use of $110m USD to buy back shares.

EDIT: I'm actually quite suprised that no one else here is even aware that this is not only a legal activity, a smart one (it's a heck of a lot better than reverse splitting stock!), but also fairly common.

Read the Financial Times, WSJ, The Economist, etc. and other newspapers/website which specialise in financial information.

Read books like "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffet's book and all. Get some basic knowledge of where to invest, and what sort of investments are available, their difference, etc.

Here are some of the books I read in order when I started:
- Buffetology
- The The Warren Buffett Way
- The Little Book That Builds Wealth
- The Outsiders
- Margin of Safety
- Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

They're easy to digest unlike the heavier, technical-oriented ones like McKinsey Valuation. If you can finish these books within a year and apply their principles, you're 100% ahead of the pack. Granted, these have a "value" spin on it, so if you're looking for a different theme then just ask around for suggestions.

Subscribe to /r/SecurityAnalysis. It's a buy-side analyst/PM subreddit. Also, do some casual reading of the industry primers here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5ixagmeivysinhs/AAB3CChscGgfR3dO2gMfuVcaa?dl=0

Regarding your 2nd edit, just list down the books you've read in a single line under the "Misc/Volunteer/Leadership" section. Then go into detail on what you've learned from them in your cover letter. It's not enough to show that you strive to be well-read, you must have read the books already.

It's pretty decent. Shkreli is an ass, but he knows his stuff.

His book picks were:
-Margin of Safety
-Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits - Phil Fisher
-Principles of Corp. Finance - Brealey and Meyers
-Aswath Damodaran's blogs/books
-For entertainment: Jack Schwager's Market Wizards

Margin of Safety is great, really clarifies things and brings you back to basics. I reread it a few months ago

Other books on investing:

• The Most Important Thing" by Howard Hughes - you'll love it if you liked margin of safety

• Einhorn's "fooling some of the people" (shorting Allied Capital)

• Ackman's "Confidence Game" (Shorting MBIA)

• Graham and Dodd (I've just read summaries from buffetbooks.com)

• Buffet's biography (The making of an american capitalist, Snowball is still on my reading list)

• Barbarians at the Gate (for LBOs)

• Too Big to Fail for an understanding of the '08 crash

• Liar's Poker for an understanding of the sell-side

• Wolf of Wall Street has some great advice but is more general business related (ignore the movie)

• The whole "Market Wizards" series was a great introduction to investing for me

• "The Art of Short Selling" is one I just read and invaluable too

• Last but not least "The Richest Man in Babylon" is a valuable parable

This list should keep everyone here busy for a while haha

I'm in the same boat as you. I've read A Random Walk on Wall Street and it has helped me immensely in developing some basic knowledge of the market. I've since moved onto The Intelligent Investor and some stuff is kind of repeated between the two books but there is still some very important information. Always keep reading and you'll be surprised with the information you can pick up!

This and Security Analysis are really the only two you need in order to be a pretty effective individual investor. "You Can be a Stock Market Genius", by Greenblatt is also pretty good, and a lot more interesting than "The Little Book That Beats the Market." Also, read Howard Marks's book when it comes out; if it's even a fraction as good as his letters it will be excellent.

Also, "The Black Swan" by Taleb. That book changed my outlook on investing.

Khan Academy has a ton of videos on various subjects in finance, accounting, macroeconomics, etc. Doing a quick Ctrl+F, there are intro videos for all three financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows), so that should be another good starting point.

Here's another good take on the settlement.

Oranges, lemons and forex: How to understand the market-rigging scandal

Pandas uses numpy as its processor base, which calls in C and FORTRAN libraries. The general practice is to code what you need to run high-performance in C or Java, and use Python as a glue so you don't have to spend nearly as much time on boilerplate code.

Incidentally, there's a new book that focuses on Python for Finance. Most of the use-case focuses on data analysis and more efficiency in use, but it does mention tie-ins to C/FORTRAN libraries or compiled code when necessary for performance.

> All executed trades must receive the prevailing market price at execution, all the time.

That's not exactly right. The rule is that executed trades must receive AT LEAST the prevailing market price (nbbo).

Brokers can match trades and give you a better price. RH isn't doing that, costing you money.

Schwab has a good explanation here https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/active_trader/trading_tools/execution_quality/price_improvement

Long straddle is the term for betting on volatility. Essentially, you buy a put and a call with the same strike price and expiration date. If the stock has moved enough to cover the premium paid on the options, then you gain money. The video below explains it better than I can.

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/long-straddle?playlist=Finance

The Intelligent Investor, Margin of Safety and Security Analysis are seminal texts with respect to Value Investing. They aren't really related to advanced economics.

On a less academic note, I think Liar's Poker is something everyone reads at one point or another. It makes for an entertaining read.

This is kind of a stupid question, but how technical should a book be to consider it worthwhile? Graham's Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis? A Random Walk Down Wall Street? Or should I be focusing on things that are closer to textbooks?

EDIT: I see you listed II in your other comment.

EDIT DEUX: What is an appropriate way to mention that that I strive to be well-read? I don't suppose a "Books read" section is appropriate for a resume, but perhaps mentioning it in a CV?

Most of the books I've seen listed below are books that are about the culture of finance. This is fair given that the OP asked "... learning about finance."

Just in case, I'll answer the question assuming the OP was asking about learning finance. I only have exposure to the "investments" component and would recommend:

• Investments by Bodie (and Kane and Marcus)

• Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach (Bob Litterman et al.)

• Investments by Sharpe (and Alexander)

• Derivatives by Willmott

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Malkiel

• Portable MBA in Investments by Peter Bernstein

• International Investments by Bruno Solnik

I wouldn't necessarily say that your FA steered you wrong, investing in a speculative company like Tesla is not part of his job. His job is to grow wealth through financial planning and portfolio diversification.

It sounds like you are young, and have a good amount of capital to invest. If you are truly interested in learning the markets and value investing, you have a great opportunity to make some wealth over the long term.

If investing isn't interesting to you, I would still suggest ditching your FA and manage your own portfolio by investing in a diverse portfolio of mutual funds on your own through Schwab or a similar site.

If you really want to get into value investing and stock picking here are some suggestions:

1. Read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. This book is widely regarded as the bible of value investing. It will give you the foundation of knowledge for fundemental analysis, the main justification for picking stocks.

2. Read up a bit on Modern Portfolio Theory, and just get a high level understanding of the importance of diversification & the risk/reward trade off.

3. Warren Buffet's golden rule is to only invest in things that you understand. Draw on your personal experiences and knowledge to make inferences and educated decisions about the potential growth of a company.

4. Start off small. Allocate at least 60-80% of your portfolio to diversified etfs/funds, and the remainder to individual investments that you believe will outperform the market (like Tesla). Eventually, as you get more familiar with investing, you could manage your portfolio full time.

5. /r/investing and /r/investmentclub are good communities to learn from

If there was a large profit to be made in Wasabi farming then I would consider it.

What sort of investing are you trying to get her into? Do you want her to trade regularly, buy long-term in a taxable account, or buy a target date retirement fund in a Roth?

You should have a conversation with her. You can't force someone to do something, but you can present the facts and hope that it piques her interest. Then once she is interested, you can present her with something that will help teach her to save and/or invest (The Richest Man in Babylon is a good starting point, as well as countless other books).

If you're trying to get her into trading regularly, then a simulator is a good place to start. But you can't force her to use it and make good decisions.

You could take her to a brokerage to setup an account, but she will have the ability to remove the money.

Finance is about valuing securities through time dependent on risk and return. Most research in finance is concerning explaining as much of the risk in the market as possible, whether is be idiosyncratic, systematic, or something else. In my opinion, picking stocks and speculating about their future prices isn't finance. With the right knowledge and tools you can design a security that will give you any payoff structure you can imagine, given a certain amount of risk, where individual company selection has no bearing. I would recommend looking into Modern Portfolio Theory. I think "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," by Malkiel would be a good place to start if you have not read it.

Edit: The term securities could be broadened to anything with value.

Educational:

• The Intelligent Investor (Ben Graham on Value Investing). The edition with Zweig commentary was very insightful.
• Common Sense on Mutual Funds (Jack Bogle on Mutual funds)
• One up on Wall Street (Peter Lynch on investing in what you know)
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (Philip Fisher on growth investing)
• The Essays of Warren Buffett edited by Cunningham - Contains Buffett's comprehensive views on corporate governance.

All of these are relatively classic works that'll teach you the framework of investing and effective management.

Fun/Entertaining:

• Monkey Business: Swinging through the Wall Street Jungle - A somewhat biased but uncanny portrayal of investment banking as an analysis.
• Liar's Poker: Michael Lewis writes about his time spent at Salomon Brothers.

When you drive your car, do you look ahead or in the rear view mirror? The last traded price is the last price that a trade was executed. It doesn't necessary mean that is what is available.

One thing many new traders misunderstand is that the stock market is not like a grocery store where there is one seller and you take whatever price they give you.

The stock market consists of market participants (like yourself) that are buyers and sellers. Once the price that the buyer is willing to buy and the price that a seller is willing to sell, a trade/market is created and executed.

So, just because there was a seller and/or buyer a minute ago that traded at one price, doesn't mean that there are still buyers and sellers willing to take that trade at the same price.

The stock price (which is really the last traded price) is important to know the trend throughout the day that buyers and sellers are meeting at. But if you want to trade, you need to find the price that buyers and sellers are willing to trade at. For this, you need to look at the Order Book. This will tell you what price and what quantity buyers and sellers are willing to execute a trade.

Monetary policy has always been in play. The Romans frequently debased (that is, increased the alloy/base metal ratio) their coinage and the U.S. went off the gold standard numerous times, especially during wars. Really the gold standard was only adhered to when it was convenient, so historically it did not play the role that Austrians wish it would. Basically just because gold was historically used as currency does not mean that it controlled the money supply. For example, most sovereign transactions were simply recorded by symbolic "money things."* And even if the gold standard did automatically protect the value of money, inflation is a hell of a lot better than deflation anyway. You want to reward people for putting their money to work, not sticking it in a mattress.

*For further information on the history of gold currency and money in general, see section 2 of this article from the LSE: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268098000159

>They have said the measure perpetuates government bailouts, and >that any collapse of a large firm should be left to a bankruptcy court.

People forget that it would have been way worse without it. The fines and penalties levied after should have been a lot harder.

When I was in school, Ronald Reagan and Republicans pushed the Hell out of 401k's, as the only way one could have a decent retirement.

>Ronald Reagan had made personal saving through tax-deferred individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, a component of his campaign and presidency. Payroll deductions for IRAs were allowed in 1981 and Ted Benna hoped to extend that feature to his new plan. He established a salary-reducing 401(k) plan even before the Internal Revenue Service had finished writing the regulations that would govern it. The government agency surprised many observers when it provisionally approved the plan in spring 1981 and specifically sanctioned Benna's interpretation of the law that fall.

Found here. I also remember the general concepts of Reagan's speeches, because I'm old.

He's using XCode. It's an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) for writing programs. C++ is a compiled language, which means that you write the program in a series of text files in an IDE or text editor and then run a compiler which creates an executable, such as a .exe file in Windows land.

Download the Anaconda distribution for easy Python install with libraries. It will also install LiClipse (Eclipse lightweight). Found here: https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/ (might get some security warnings, but it is fine).

checkio is a great resource for actually testing if your code passes unit tests (and is kind of fun too: https://www.checkio.org/)

Behavioral economics and psychology.

Psychology plays a huge part in finance and investing. In the opening pages of The Intelligent Investor, Warren Buffett says "This book precisely and clearly prescribe the proper framework. You must supply the emotional discipline."

Also, regarding incentives, which is something Charlie Munger, Buffett's right-hand man, talks about quite a lot, psychology can help you understand "the other side". The Wells Fargo scandal - incentives were out of whack.

Lastly, hedge funds deploy a bit of psychology when making investment decisions: https://www.ft.com/content/8dfc834c-1ddf-11e3-85e0-00144feab7de

If you would like tl;dr for that link: "Hedge funds turn to psychology software to revolutionize trading... 'Emotions and mood play a big part in performance. I know when I was a fund manager I would have loved to have had access to this technology, which is a sort of checklist for top performance.'"

I'd say don't force yourself through it. I read it a few years ago (it was mostly fun), but only a handful of things stuck with me between that and The Intelligent Investor (read a few times).

You may be better served reading stuff like Warren Buffet's shareholder letters or guides to accounting, and getting hands on looking at analyst reports, 10ks and 10qs.

You'll basically need to know the fundamentals of balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements to evaluate companies on a specific basis.

If you certainly want to follow Buffett, Graham, and Dodd, take a look around http://www.grahamanddoddsville.net/

In addition to /r/finance, a good sub that is focused on precisely this is /r/SecurityAnalysis.

Check out their sidebar, as well as the Value Investing section of their recommended reading.

Classically obligatory reads include, but are not limited to:

• The Intelligent Investor, by Ben Graham
• You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, by Joel Greenblatt
• One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch
• Security Analysis, by Ben Graham

Just so you know, get ready to do a lot of reading. Also, I second /u/Navster's recommendation. You're going to be bumping into Damodaran a lot in your research.

Kevinpb has some good anecdotal books on how the industry works but they are exposes, so I don't think they would be a great benefit in an interview except from a general knowledge of how some companies did some crazy shit. There are also good books on investment approach that would be much more useful to an interview and what I would consider required reading if you want to join the field: The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham Security Analysis, David Dodd Any of Warren Buffet's memos or essays and The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks

Haha, I know what you are talking about. I knew a few of those kids when I was in high school. Looking back on it, all they did was regurgitate whatever they heard Jim Cramer said. But I ended up with a job in the field, but they didn't.

I would say the best thing to do for you is to read books, and a lot of them. Here are a few books that I recommend as introductions:

Unconventional Success, by David Swensen, the CFO of the Yale endowment, arguable the most successful endowment fund in history.

One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch, the head of the Magellan Fund. Magellan, under him, managed to outperform the market by over 20 years, a feat few save the likes of Warren Buffett can achieve.

Intelligent Investor, by Ben Graham, the mentor of Warren Buffett.

Depends on the context in which you wish to learn about finance, and what specifically you want to do with this information.

Do you want to gain IB-level proficiency? 'Financial Modeling' by Simon Benninga is the definitive resource for a crash course in Excel and Financial concepts taught together.

Do you want an investment philosophy? 'Security Analysis' by Graham/Dodd is a tough read, or 'Intelligent Investor' by Graham are good and storied choices.

More recently, there's 'One Up on Wall Street', by Peter Lynch, 'Stocks for the Long Run' by Jeremy Siegel, and 'Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits' by Philip Fisher.

Here's a few off the top of my head:

• Random Walk Down Wall Street -Burton G. Malkiel
• The Intelligent Investor -Ben Graham
• Millionare Next Door -Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
• Think and Grow Rich -Napoleon Hill

In this case, it looks like you should have received a combination of cash, stock of Neulion, and warrants (likely now expired - although you're actually lucky). Go back and double check everything you may have received by mail or email, as you should have been notified.

Edit: Answer to last question - no, you almost certainly don't own any shares in INSINC, but you likely own shares in Neulion and should have received money.

It is in a family and friends account or personal account? The f&f structure will allow you to take on 15 investors without registration . Many people take this route before transitioning. You can also do a hedge fund incubator or get into one of the hedge fund hotels - talk to your prime broker, but generally the larger firms want to see over a couple of mill, the smaller ones will help and even funnel investments with half that. If you are thinking offshore, do not its not worth it imo until you get up in the few dozen mill range. Commodity funds are also easier to run compliance than equities.

Two of the cheaper hedge fund setup firms are Turnkey and Green Company, you can get everything done for about 15-20k depending on your requirements. Just remember you get what you pay for and those companies just fill out boilerplate templates and get you setup asap.

They're not all the same kind of problem. Etsy has issues with shipping, branding, currency pressures and search/tech implementation. I could write a 10 page paper on it. But, I'm just here to find out what happens when the stock become essentially worthless. Right now it's down 75% from the IPO and last time they were given the opportunity executives and other insiders dumped their stock. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/etsy-shares-fall-after-expiration-of-lockup-agreement-2016-01-11 It's completely possibly they nor I know more about Etsy's prospects than you do, but I'm not really here to argue about it.

Do you mean articles as in academic journal articles or Forbes?

In case the first, Google Scholar is your friend: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=working+capital&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=Journal+of+Finance&as_ylo=2010&as_yhi=2012&btnG=&hl=fi&as_sdt=0

I use the Wall Street Breakfast (daily commentary from Seeking Alpha). It's a great overview of everything that happens in the markets/global economy.

http://seekingalpha.com/author/wall-street-breakfast

Per this metric AAPL will go down:

http://www.random.org/coins/?num=11&cur=20-novelty.voting-2004 *

• Bush = go up (bush is before kerry in alphabet and thus stock goes up) (3 of 11 flips) Kerry = go down (8 of 11 flips)

A lot of misinformation in this sector. You expect people to buy Uranium, but many of them are thinking this:

According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “We want the electricity of the future to be safe, reliable and economically viable.”

Some brilliant advice regarding trading based on current events:

As humans, we have a tendency toward recency bias. In other words, we give recent events extra importance when making decisions. The recent radiation crisis in Japan is an example.

Further reading: http://seekingalpha.com/article/273234-ignoring-germany-s-nuclear-u-turn?source=yahoo

Signed Certificate of Achievement for finishing it. Pay $50 and use a webcam every time to take a test, with a writing sample where they study your typing patterns, and you get a more official Verified Certificate. I'm thinking about going for it, because I don't have anything hand-signed from a Nobel Prize-winning economist on my walls.

Coursera has a bunch of online courses (most of them from top universities, taught by people such as Schiller and John Cochrane) with video lectures, notes and problem sets. If you have the discipline to follow the program accordingly, it is a very nice resource.

Read "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham, that will tell you everything you need to know. In short, Do you homework and look for cheap issue. Then sell when other want to buy, and buy when others want to sell. Sounds easy, but involves the most difficult virtue for an investor: discipline.

I have been really into finance books the past few months and have finished quite and found a few that are definitely worth picking up and reading. The Millionaire Next Door Rich Dad Poor Dad Think and Grow Rich The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

Enjoy!

You're asking for a LOT. I mean, entire lives and volumes upon volumes of information is out there.

I'd recommend Benjamin Graham for finance concepts (might be a little bit dry...), A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel and A Concise Guide to Macro Economics by David Moss.

I've read Misbehaving (by Thaler) and Predictably Irrational (by Ariely) and enjoyed both a lot.

Misbehaving is more on the Economics side while Predictably Irrationnal is more psychological, but they are both books about behavioral econ.

They are both very accessible!

Great blog and easy to understand: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com

I reread the blog posts chronologically this summer and they were as good and informative as remembered.

Edit: And you have to read Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you haven't had the chance yet.

First of all, you should read some literature about investing. As for me, usually, I suggest people to read 2 fantastic books for investing: 1. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffett calls The Intelligent Investor the best book ever written on investing. That's high praise. 2. Money, Master The Game by Tony Robbins. This is not just a book on investing in stocks, but it is a book on managing your money. Robbins interviewed many Billionaire investors including Warren Buffett. It's a great read. But recenly I've seen interesting selection of books for investing and I was excited. Also if you wanna be succrssful investor the main feature you should have is patience. Don't worry if you invest in some asset and it becomes cheaper, investing is a long-term activity, but be careful and analyse new before investing. Hope these books and pieces of advice will help you in your future investments.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel or Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett. Read them both in college, so appropriate for your audience. Tbf, the latter isn't equity related, but I'm sure your students would enjoy it.

Can't recommend highly enough The Essays of Warren Buffett. It's a compilation of the letters to shareholders that Buffet wrote, but they've been organized by topic to make it WAY easier to read.

Covers tons of information about his investment philosophy an dhow he looks at companies, and should fit your criteria.

Hey OP! A great place to start is "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Gordon Malkiel.

I also tell my students to watch the various videos produced by Investopedia on investing basics. The visual guide can be very helpful for a beginner, and allows you to consume new information in bite-size pieces.

Learning about investing is like learning a new language, and will take time to absorb. Read the Wall Street Journal every day if you have the time. Listen to earnings call recordings, and write down every word that's unfamiliar. After the call is over, go and learn every term, even on a basic level.

Investment Banking - Rosenbaum and Pearl. Just bought it and it's incredibly informative. The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks. The guy is a genius, he is the reason I want to work for Oaktree eventually. The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham. The quintessential guide on value investing. There are tons more, but these can help you get started. Also take in as much news as you can and always be on top of current events. Follow up on as much company information as possible. Information is one of, if not the, most important commodity in the market.

Graham's books are very, very good reads.

I have read The Intelligent Investor a few times and finished Security Analysis 2nd Edition for the first time last year.

The Intelligent Investor is somewhat broader, comparing an "enterprising" investor to a "defensive" investor and defining the differences between speculation and investing. He also glints a bit into what you should look for in a prudent investment, including key ratios (P/E, debt, etc) and some filters.

You cannot directly improve your equity performance to beat the market consistently. Reading Graham and studying a company's financial statements will give you a better insight to what and why you are investing in a company.

In some instances, Graham insists on staying out of the market for years at a time until good companies become cheap - in the meantime, invest secondary companies that are fairly priced or undervalued in some regard.

Even Warren Buffett suggests that investing in an index fund is the best bet for most people.

Understood.

By directly - I meant that there is no relationship such as if I do X, my portfolio performance will increase by Y.

The markets already know more about a company than you do. By reading the financial statements and listening to the conference calls, you will understand more about what is going on but it will not give you an edge. I think of this as an indirect improvement as you understand more about what you invest in and where mistakes are made.

Outperformance is generally determined by the amount of risk you take. Investing in something deemed more risky (eg. value companies) increases our expected returns. An increase in sharpe ratio, or "alpha" (excess return over benchmark without increased risk) is what we search for and hope to achieve.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton Malkiel) describes perfectly all the fallacies associated with beating the market, and how difficult it can be to do consistently - along with the reasons active managers fail to beat their benchmarks year after year.

I will continue to invest in value companies as an attempt at increased returns. However, I do not expect to come out ahead.

My 401(k) and retirement funds will stay in index funds.

If you are ultra interested and have a bachelors degree, do your CFA. There are definitely Argentinian hedge funds and portfolio managers. You should read The Economist weekly.

If you want to decide ultimately if you want to be in the stock market as a living, read The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham.

A professor of mine suggested A Random Walk Down Wall Street saying it was a must read for all finance majors...it is also quite easy to understand as well!

The Intelligent Investor is such a good book. I am only a few chapters in but from the first few pages i was hooked. As a fellow high school student, i find that it can be difficult to comprehend some ideas that he is trying to convey, but after re-reading the sentence it becomes clear. 9/10 would read again.

>They're not all the same kind of problem.

I mean problems of that magnitude, vs., say, the company misstating its financials, or users like yourself revolting en masse by moving to eBay or some other platform.

> But, I'm just here to find out what happens when the stock become essentially worthless.

There's no guarantee that this will happen: it would imply that the company is on the edge of or in the process of bankruptcy. If you're convinced it will happen, go short.

>Right now it's down 75% from the IPO and last time they were given the opportunity executives and other insiders dumped their stock. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/etsy-shares-fall-after-expiration-of-lockup-agreement-2016-01-11

As I said before, a) that link doesn't say what you seem to think it does, and b) even if it did - if you found evidence that Union Square and Accel are selling out - it would say nothing about the company at all.

>It's completely possibly they nor I know more about Etsy's prospects than you do, but I'm not really here to argue about it.

Where on earth have I suggested that I know anything about Etsy's prospects?