91–100 of 211 posts
Ray Dalio
Marcos Lopez de Prado
These authors are how I started. I'd be happy to list specific books if that is helpful, but I don't want to give you a false sense that if you read books I mention you will have the same understanding that I do.
Elliott Wave Principle by Robert Prechter and A. J Frost https://epdf.pub/queue/elliott-wave-principle-key-to-market-... This is the technical analysis method used by many market traders and it both predicted this week's market plunge as well as described its form, and is currently forecasting a further plunge next week. For economics I would look for any youtube talk by Prof. Steven Keen - he accounts for debt that…
I'll wait for next week to see if that's true before adding it to my list.
The starting point I would recommend is bottom up, through accounting and financial statements. Core knowledge, of both practical and intellectual value. Tons of books here, I particularly like
Thomas Ittelson - Financial Statements
Accessible, straightforward, friendly.
After that, any of the collections of
Warren Buffett's Letters to Shareholders
are both entertaining and intellectually valuable, and provide great insight. Read forward, eg, from his first letters in the 1960s, to now.
One of the realizations in the journey is that there are, and have been, a lot of different kinds of money- credit money and exchange money and asset money and so forth. A relatively abstract/intellectual but immensely useful survey is
The Nature of Money - Geoffrey Ingham
The concept of an asset is critical to the functioning of the financial system. New kinds of assets are created all the time. One of the best written books I have read recently goes into venture capital and debt asset creation:
The Code Of Capital - Katharina Pistor
The role of different kinds of money in history, especially US history, is absolutely fascinating. I am in the middle of
American Bonds - Sarah Quinn
and can recommend.
I do not especially recommend the Dalio books or Graeber's Debt or Ferguson's books. They are fine but I did not find them helping me build understanding. Not quite junk food, but definitely not protein.
I unfortunately have not found any of the books I have seen about the Federal Reserve to be worthy of recommending. My wife works there and so I have perhaps a unique perspective. But nothing conveys the challenge and the mechanics of what they do. Still looking. The papers the various Fed banks publish, as well as the papers published by the Bank of England, are uniformly outstanding.
Finally, some of the bitcoin people have written about money. Tho I am a believer in bitcoin I absolutely recommend against most of them, especially Saifedean Ammous's book. Do not read.
Good luck!
This is an online course, not a book, but it changed my understanding of finance. I studied Economics (initially) at university, and never found anything close to as useful as this class: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
I have almost 10 years in the finance industry, both buyside and sellside and my take is that, while there are some fundamental principles at play, the world of finance is too messy and complicated for any one book to describe it. An even stronger statement I am willing to make is that no one person correctly and fully understands the financial system. So, once you accept that there is no "correct" answer to how the…
"Money Stuff" is excellent. I also recommend the FT. Their Alphaville section is very good. One of my favorite classic Levine articles is "Regulators Want to Slow Runs on Derivatives." Some other resources I came across via those and friends: • "Other People's Money" by Kay • "Zombie Banks" • "The Money Problem" • This NY Fed study of shadow banking: https://www.ft.com/content/1a222bf4-f33d-11df-a4fa-00144feab... • "…
Make massively risky bets on things that rarely break, but when they do they break so epically that the government will bail you out.
Here is a PDF of a diagram I made to help organize my understanding of this content: https://www.lucidchart.com/publicSegments/view/e1d12ae5-a8a0...
For learning I strongly recommend against almost all books mentioned in this thread. They don't really teach how financial systems work in the society or the underlying principles. They give you just a viewpoint. Some of them are good read after you know the basics. You need to pick up real college textbook (or online course) and read the parts that interest you and skim other parts. Example: Introduction to Finance:…
I recommend against Mankiw, and to be honest, macroeconomics as a whole. But particularly undergrad macroeconomics. Undergrad macro textbooks are more or less designed to teach you how to work a model, and how to prove theorems about a model. But when all is said and done, macro tends not to go the distance and demonstrate how the model relates to the real world. They also get important details wrong. Most of the wes…
I'm referring to the book: 'N. Gregory Mankiw, Laurence Ball - Macroeconomics and the Financial System-Worth Publishers (2010)