Ask HN: How did you learn about stocks and the market?

Don't forget the flip-side here, too. Some of the first books I read about the stock market weren't about the stock market at all, but about confidence scams, gambling and the inner workings of Wall Street.

Playing the stock market is, at its core, gambling, and any good gambling book will devote a large portion of itself to explaining the basic principle of money management: Of knowing when to cut your losses and how to prevent yourself from going on a huge tilt.

If you learn more about how confidence scams work you can better avoid pump and dump schemes, smooth talking investment "advice" people, and will be more wise about opportunities too good to be true.

Most of all you need to know how these securities are packaged, what the motivation of the players behind the scenes are, and how the market works internally. Be aware of the sharks in the water and what sorts of investments are being manipulated by things like high-frequency trading.

They say the final lesson is to be prepared to set fire to $10,000 in cash because no matter how good you are as an investor there will come a day where that much or more goes up in smoke based on market movements. If you can handle that, psychologically, you'll be fine. If that thought really freaks you out, better hold on to something more conservative.

I knew a bit about accounting when I started investing and didn't even realize how much it helped me until I heard other investors talk about companies in ways I knew were based on completely flawed assumptions.

I don't think accounting basics will help you much in terms of beating the markt. But they may help you not to be the one who funds other people's outperformance by making stupid mistakes.

Learn to read a balance sheet, an income statement and a cash flow statement. You'll easily find good enough sources for that by googling these terms.

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Read the Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Bogle, and have stayed the course every since. The more and more I learned about trading, market analysis, arbitration (trying to take advantage of an information market mismatch), I realized my time would be better spent doing something I enjoy and Investing (with a capital I) the Bogle way. In short, buy into passively managed index funds (Vanguard funds, etc) with low cost ratios over time, and dont touch until you must...

Ah, I did not know that, thanks!