Ongoing things to do and read to improve knowledge of finance?
"I'm another programmer, I guess we all just like complicated things, or got here via stackoverflow. Obligatory tedious but accurate point: Investing is not personal finance, in fact it's maybe one of the less important parts of it. See this answer: Where to start with personal finance?  Obligatory warning for software developer type minds: getting into investing because it's complicated and therefore fun is a really awful idea from a financial perspective.  Or see behavioral finance research on how analytical/professional/creative type people are often terrible at investing, while even-tempered practical people are better. The thing with investing is that inaction is better than action, tried and true is better than creative, and simple is better than complicated. So if you're like me and many programmers and like creative, complicated action - not good for the wallet. You've been warned. That said. :-) Stuff I read In general I hate reading too much financial information because I think it makes me take ill-advised actions. The actions I most need to take have to do with my career and my spending patterns. So I try to focus on reading about software development, for example. Or I answer questions on this site, which at least might help someone out, and I enjoy writing. For basic financial news and research, I prefer Morningstar.com, especially if you get the premium version. The writing has more depth, it's often from qualified financial analysts, and with the paid version you get data and analysis on thousands of funds and stocks, instead of a small number as with Motley Fool newsletters. I don't follow Morningstar regularly anymore, instead I use it for research when I need to pick funds in a 401k or whatever. Another caveat on Morningstar is that the ""star ratings"" on funds are dumb. Look at the Analyst Picks and the analyst writeups instead. I just flipped through my RSS reader and I have 20-30 finance-related blogs in there collecting unread posts. It looks like the only one I regularly read is http://alephblog.com/ which is sort of random. But I find David Merkel very thoughtful and interesting. He's also a conservative without being a partisan hack, and posts frequently. I read the weekly market comment at http://hussmanfunds.com/ as well. Most weeks it says the market is overvalued, so that's predictable, but the interesting part is the rationale and the other ideas he talks about. I read a lot of software-related blogs and there's some bleed into finance, especially from the VC world; blogs like http://www.avc.com/ or http://bhorowitz.com/ or whatever. Anyway I spend most of my reading time on career-related stuff and I think this is also the correct decision from a financial perspective. If you were a doctor, you'd be better off reading about doctoring, too. I read finance-related books fairly often, I guess there are other threads listing ideas on that front. I prefer books about principles rather than a barrage of daily financial news and questionable ideas. Other than that, I keep up with headlines, just reading the paper every day including business-related topics is good enough. If there's some big event in the financial markets, it'll show up in the regular paper. Take a class I initially learned about finance by reading a pile of books and alongside that taking the CFP course and the first CFA course. Both are probably equivalent to about a college semester worth of work, but you can plow through them in a couple months each if you focus. You can just do the class (and take the exam if you like), without having to go on and actually get the work experience and the certifications. I didn't go on to do that. This sounds like a crazy thing to do, and it kind of is, but I think it's also sort of crazy to expect to be competent on a topic without taking some courses or otherwise getting pretty deep into the material. If you're a normal person and don't have time to take finance courses, you're likely better off either keeping it super-simple, or else outsourcing if you can find the right advisor: What exactly can a financial advisor do for me, and is it worth the money?  When it's inevitably complex (e.g. as you approach retirement) then an advisor is best. My mom is retiring soon and I found her a professional, for example. I like having a lot of knowledge myself, because it's just the only way I could feel comfortable. So for sure I understand other people wanting to have it too. But what I'd share from the other side is that once you have it, the conclusion is that you don't have enough knowledge (or time) to do anything fancy anyway, and that the simple answers are fine. Check out http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Simple-Financial-Strategies-People/dp/0743269942 Investing for fun isn't investing for profit Many people recommend Motley Fool (I see two on this question already!). The site isn't evil, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it promotes an attitude toward and a style of investing that isn't objectively justifiable for practical reasons. Essentially I don't think optimizing for making money and optimizing for having fun coexist very well. If investing is your chosen hobby rather than fishing or knitting, then Motley Fool can be fun with their tone and discussion forums, but other people in forums are just going to make you go wrong money-wise; see behavioral finance research again. Talking to others isn't compatible with ice in your decision-making veins. Also, Motley Fool tends to pervasively make it sound like active investing is easier than it is. There's a reason the Chartered Financial Analyst curriculum is a few reams of paper plus 4 years of work experience, rather than reading blogs. Practical investing (""just buy the target date fund"") can be super easy, but once you go beyond that, it's not. I don't really agree with the ""anyone can do it and it's not work!"" premise, any more than I think that about lawyering or doctoring or computer programming. After 15 years I'm a programming expert; after some courses and a lot of reading, I'm not someone who could professionally run an actively-managed portfolio. I think most of us need to have the fun part separate from the serious cash part. Maybe literally distinct accounts that you keep at separate brokerages. Or just do something else for fun, besides investing. Morningstar has this problem too, and finance.yahoo.com, and Bloomberg, I mean, they are all interested in making you think about investing a lot more than you ought to. They all have an incentive to convince you that the latest headlines make a difference, when they don't. Bottom line, I don't think personal finance changes very quickly; the details of specific mutual funds change, and there's always some new twist in the tax code, but the big picture is pretty stable. I think going in-depth (say, read the Chartered Financial Analyst curriculum materials) would teach you a lot more than reading blogs frequently. The most important things to work on are income (career) and spending (to maximize income minus spending). That's where time investment will pay off. I know it's annoying to argue the premise of the question rather than answering, but I did try to mention a couple things to read somewhere in there ;-)" The best learning technique for me is not to dredge through books in order to gain a better understanding of finance.  This is tedious and causes me to lose interest.  I'm not sure of your tolerance for this type of learning.  I tend to learn in small pieces.  Something piques my interest and I go off reading about that particular topic. May I suggest some alternate methods: Good luck! I've found Pragmatic Capitalism very helpful. "For learning about finances my main two financial resources are this site, and the Motley Fool. My secondary sources are keeping up with columns by my favourite economic journalists - in the press in the US, Australia, England, and India. Regarding your comment about feeling green on the basics despite the reading - you're not alone. I've been interested in financials for better than 10 years, but there are a lot of questions on this site where I say to myself, ""I've no idea of what the answer could be, what are our resident experts saying?"" Having said that, there are some topics where I feel as though I can weigh in - and they tend to be where I have a little book knowledge and a lot of personal experience." "Before you can truly learn, you must unlearn first. I recommend the book ""Fooled by Randomness"" by Nassim Taleb."
Best of luck!  Just an FYI, a great deal of finance firms look for people like you.  The way you perceive things is completely different from the way someone who is traditionally trained in finance.  Look into some peers of DE.  Also, Private Equity (PE) firms...mainly the ones dealing with bio/pharma/whatever you specialize in.  What are your excel skills like?  Make them better!  No mouse.  Know VLOOKUP, GETPIVOTDATA, etc.  Again, not to become redundant, but figure out what you want to do and go from there...  If you are good/quick with your math look for trading.  There are a lot of books out there on the subject of trading.  Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, will give you an insight to the lifestyle/mantra of traders (during the 80s).  If you like digging into numbers/investigating things you may want to look into a more analytical role.  To figure out if you like this read some financial statements.  Look on SEC.gov, navigate to EDGAR.  Look up a 10-k (annual report) and a 10-q (quarterly report).  See if you like poking around/figuring out why and how things work.  Hit up seekingalpha.com.  This is a hodgepodge of people's opinion.  Saying why they want to buy/sell a security.  Look at the reasons.  They will cite certain economic indicators or other signals.  Seekingalpha is a place that can show you how financial types think.  See how your views differ or align.  Or even if you can expand on what they are saying.  Investopedia is a great place to learn jargon and other terms.  Frequent this place.  Key terms: http://www.financialmodelingguide.com/financial-modeling-tips/tips/banking-financial-terms/  This gives short definitions.  Investopedia will give you in depth definitions.  Are you currently employed as a RandomAcademicDean?  Does your college offer free courses to staff?  If yes, take some classes FOR FREE!  Take an accounting course (skip managerial, stick with financial), an econ course, a finance course.  I am going to assume your college offers a class in Econometrics.  Talk to one of the professors, if you think this class would be manageable, sign up.  They will probably say your should take MACRO and MICRO.  This is true, but you have a P.h.D in Chemistry so you have a demonstrated aptitude towards academia.  Econometrics, in short, can be considered the science of business.  Bottom line:  Figure our your interest within the financial realm, act upon it.  Play up your knowledge in chemistry (as a quantitative science) and experience as a dean (think management role).  tl;dr soak up knowledge.  regurgitate when necessary. P.h.D = good. read a lot.  Finance is a big world, you will fit in! Assuming you were immersed in math with your CS degree, the book **'A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street' by Andrew Lo** is a very interesting book about the random walk hypothesis and it's application to financial markets and how efficient markets might not necessarily imply complete randomness.    Lots of higher level concepts in the book but it's an interesting topic if you are trying to branch out into the quant world.  The book isn't very specific towards algorithmic trading but it's good for concept and ideas.  Especially for general finance, that will give you a good run down about markets and the way we tackle modern finance.    **A Random Walk Down Wall Street** (which the book above is named after) by **Burton Malkiel** is also supposed to be a good read and many have suggested reading it before the one I listed above, but there really isn't a need to do so.    For investing specifically, many mention **'The Intelligent Investor' by Benjamin Graham** who is the role model for the infamous Warren Buffet.  It's an older book and really dry and I think kind of out dated but mostly still relevant.  It's more specifically about individual trading rather than markets as a whole or general markets.  It sounds like you want to learn more about markets and finance rather than simply trading or buying stocks.  So I'd stick to the Andrew Lo book first.    ---  Also, since you might not know, it would be a good idea to understand the capital asset pricing model, free cash flow models, and maybe some dividend discount models, the last of which isn't so much relevant but good foundations for your finance knowledge.  They are models using various financial concepts (TVM is almost used in every case) and utilizing them in various ways to model certain concepts.  You'd most likely be immersed in many of these topics by reading a math-oriented Finance book.  Try to stay away from those penny stock trading books, I don't think I need to tell a math major (who is probably much smarter than I am) that you don't need to be engaging in penny stocks, but do your DD and come to a conclusion yourself if you'd like.  I'm not sure what career path you're trying to go down (personal trading, quant firm analyst, regular analyst, etc etc) but it sounds like you have the credentials to be doing quant trading.    ---  Check out www.quantopian.com.  It's a website with a python engine that has all the necessary libraries installed into the website which means you don't have to go through the trouble yourself (and yes, it is fucking trouble--you need a very outdated OS to run one of the libraries).  It has a lot of resources to get into algorithmic trading and you can begin coding immediately.  You'd need to learn a little bit of python to get into this but most of it will be using matplotlib, pandas, or some other library and its own personal syntax. Learning about alpha factors and the Pipeline API is also moderately difficult to get down but entirely possible within a short amount of dedicated time.     Also, if you want to get into algorithmic trading, check out Sentdex on youtube.  He's a python programmer who does a lot of videos on this very topic and has his own tool on quantopian called 'Sentiment Analyzer' (or something like that) which basically quantifies sentiment around any given security using web scrapers to scrape various news and media outlets.  Crazy cool stuff being developed over there and if you're good, you can even be partnered with investors at quantopian and share in profits.    You can also deploy your algorithms through the website onto various trading platforms such as Robinhood and another broker and run your algorithms yourself.    Lots of cool stuff being developed in the finance sector right now.  Modern corporate finance and investment knowledge is built on quite old theorems and insights so expect a lot of things to change in today's world.  ---  With a math degree, finance should be like algebra I back in the day.  You just gotta get familiar with all of the different rules and ideas and concepts.  There isn't that much difficult math until you begin getting into higher level finance and theory, which mostly deals with statistics anyways like covariance and regression and other statistic-related concepts.  Any other math is simple arithmetic. Tim Ferris has some pretty good finance related episodes with hedge fund managers or personal finance authors (for e.g. the one with Ray Dalio or Tony Robbins).  They are not exclusively finance related but include some pretty in-depth conversations.  20-Minute VC is also great if you're interested in Venture Capital. Also you have to be aware that there's an academic finance which is very nice and clean and mathematical, and then there is finance how it works in the real world, which is chaotic and unpredictable.  CFA books, as mentioned by another poster, would be good for learning the former, but don't expect that knowledge to be of any practical value unless you are trying to get a degree or certification.  If you do want to go that route, focus more on information about individual financial products and less on financial market behavior.   If you want to learn more about how the markets actually work I would have to say that it's going to be very hard without any industry experience.  When I started my first job after getting my finance degree I knew absolutely nothing about how things worked.  There are some good books, though more of a good story than teaching material.  Try Michael Lewis. If you've already done some micro and macro, you are on the right track to learn finance. What you should study next depends on what kind of finance you want to know more about. Is it M&amp;A and corporate finance, more macro would not help much, but maybe some financial accounting. You could see if you could get your hands on a corporate finance text book since they are a good starting place to learn more about finance in general (and such a book is a relatively easy read). Much finance, however, requires good quantitative skills so probability, statistics, linear algebra and calculus, and their applications to finance, is never a bad thing to look into. This would open up for understanding e.g. derivatives that played a huge role in the financial crisis and in financial markets today. I'd start with learning how to read a company's financial statement and their annual report. I would recommend reading the following: All three books are cheap and readily available. If you really want to enhance your learning, grab a few annual reports from companies' websites to reference as you learn about different aspects of the financial statements. My reading list for someone just getting into personal finance would include the following I know it's a bunch but I'm trying to cover a few specific things. Yeah it's a bit of reading, but lets face it, nobody is going to care as much about your money as YOU do, and at the very least this kind of knowledge can help fend off a 'shark attack' by someone trying to sell you something not because it's best for you, but because it earns them a fat commission check. Once you've covered those, you have a good foundation, and oh lord there's so many other good books that you could read to help understand more about money, markets etc..  Personally I'd say hit this list, and just about anything on it, is worth your time to read. I've used publishers websites where I could find them, and Amazon otherwise. "I would recommend ""How to Read a Financial Report : For Managers, Entrepreneurs, Lenders, Lawyers, and Investors"" by John A. Tracy for the following reasons: I also think the book would bridge the gap nicely between a broad understanding of finance and a more serious technical know-how." Start at Investopedia. Get basic clarification on all financial terms and in some cases in detail. But get a book. One recommendation would be Hull. It is a basic book, but quite informative. Likewise you can get loads of material targeted at programmers. Wilmott's Forum is a fine place to find coders as well as finance guys. For economics I recommend mises or these videos to get you started. For daily critical analysis of financial markets, keynesian government policies, and other interesting reading I recommend zerohedge.  I've learned more about financial markets and government regulations by reading the comments section on zerohedge articles than anywhere else on the internet.  The comment section is very raw (i.e. lots of fucking cursing) but there are some jewels of information in there. For daily critical thinking I suggest lewrockwell. Financial literacy for individuals is the instruction and comprehension of different money related issues. This subject concentrates on the capacity to manage personal finance matters in a productive way, and it incorporates the information of settling on suitable choices about individual finance, for example, insurance premiums, educational fees, real estate investments, tax planning, retirement saving, budget management and so on.   Let's have a look at the importance of Financial Literacy in an Individual's life so that it can become a source of inspiration for you.   Inspiration and financial literacy for individuals enable people to end up plainly independent with the goal that they can accomplish budgetary solidness. 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We believe that your solid financial inspiration to save your expenses and turning them into handsome profits can make you a wealthy person. So, if you are really willing it, Wealth Generators is there for you, the ultimate source of your financial inspiration. "practice using excel more  read more books on investing, practice making investing thesis, practice remaining ""nice"" while getting good and bad critique, expand your knowledge (it is impossible to be the best at everything in investing due to the multiple forms of investing that have contradicting principles), and think economics.  Finance will be useless if you have a very limited understanding of ""scarcity""" "in undergrad business, you will have a broad scope of information to cover, and schools and professors will vary widely in how they approach it.  it will be hard to say for certain how you can edge out your peers before knowing what they are looking for. however, finance and business are intellectually nebulous, especially at the undergrad level. your best bet is to maintain a broad set of interests and stay well read on them.  i would recommend watching Bloomberg fairly regularly, opening a brokerage account and taking advantage of the reps you can talk to, and reading news like The Atlantic and Washington Post,  among others, as long as they are well reasoned and contemporary accounts. classic and modern economics books will give you superior frameworks in which to look at the ""smaller"" world of finance, which should set you apart from your peers as well." Can anyone recommend a good textbook for a first course in finance? I'm not studying it, if it's relevant--I'm just a guy who wants a better understanding of the financial sector. I don't know anything anout finance outside a few basic concepts. "Yep, most 401k options suck. You'll have access to a couple dozen funds that have been blessed by the organization that manages your account. I recently rolled my 401k over into a self-directed IRA at Fidelity, and I have access to the entire mutual fund market, and can trade stocks/bonds if I wish.  As for a practical solution for your situation: the options you've given us are worryingly vague -- hopefully you're able to do research on what positions these funds hold and make your own determination. Quick overview: Energy / Utilities: Doing good right now because they are low-risk, generally high dividends. These will underperform in the short-term as the market recovers. Health Care: riskier, and many firms are facing a sizable patent cliff. I am avoiding this sector. Emerging Markets: I'm also avoiding this due to the volatility and accounting issues, but it's up to you. Most large US companies have ""emerging markets"" exposure, so not necessary for to invest in a dedicated fund in my unprofessional opinion. Bonds: Avoid. Bonds are at their highest levels in decades. Short-term they might be ok; but medium-term, the only place to go is down. All of this depends on your age, and your own particular investment objectives. Don't listen to me or anyone else without doing your own research."