Hi everyone!
I was wondering if anyone here has some good suggestions for a solid intro finance book that explains all the basic stuff like derivatives/securities and all the jargon so that one has the foundation to really understand financial news and tackle more sophisticated finance material/books.
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I'm curious too
I've found "Capital Markets: Institutions and Instruments" by Fabozzi and Modigliani to be a good start.
Try 'Financial Management' by James C Van Horne
Khan academy is a great resource and it is free
"Investments: An Introduction" by Mayo
I have found "Fundamentals of Investments: Valuation and Management" by Jordan and Miller to be a solid introductory text. Additionally, if you pair this text with a another that focuses on Institutions and Markets, like "Financial Markets and Institutions" by Madura, it will really help you decipher financial news.
Find out what book your school uses (I'm assuming you are or will be in undergrad) for its finance course(s). Then buy that, and you won't have any re-reading to do once you get into the class. I did this over the summer and it worked well.
Flying in the face of what I just said, I like Simon Benninga's "Principles of Finance With Excel" because it teaches you finance through using Excel.
When I was doing internship one of the traders recommended me "Understanding Wall Street" by Little.
Investments by Mayo is the one used at my school, but we only covered half of the book during a semester, so I studied the rest on my own and it was easy to understand too, definitely recommend it
Itunes University has two great lecturers that are very accessible. Aswath Damodaran (NYU) and Robert Schiller (Yale). Both are easy to follow and provide high level overview of finance.
Start with an accounting 101 book. When you are comfortable with how the financial statements work, grab some sort of corporate finance book (FNCE 101).
Good books for non-finance professional? (Originally Posted: 07/19/2013)
I was wondering what you guys thought might be a good book for a non-finance professional. Something that gave some clear, basic advice on the likelihood of beating the market, the the problems associated with high fees, etc.
This is for family members, none of whom are doing anything crazy with their retirement accounts , but might do better if they knew a bit more about basic rules of asset allocation, etc.
Maybe something by Bogle? He's more of an efficient-marketer than I am, but for the average non-finance person, it seems like his advice will hold pretty true.
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