Is Investments by Bodie just an expanded version of Essentials of Investments?
Reading the descriptions on Amazon.com it appears Investments is a graduate text and Elements of Investments is the undergraduate version of the text. They are actually both undergraduate texts; however, Investments is FAR more complex.   Essentials of Investments really waters down the statistical and mathematical notation while Investments does not.  Investments also has an entire section (4-5 chapters) called options, futures, and other derivatives while Essentials of Investments does not.   [Of course, if you want to learn about options, futures, and other derivatives, there is a seminal book by John Hull with that exact title.] That notwithstanding, neither book is sophisticated enough to be considered a true graduate school textbook in quantitative investment theory.  No grad schools worth their salt are going to rely too heavily on Investments in a specialized finance curriculum.   It's a great book to start out, though.
1a. It isn't. Compound interest is compound interest. It works no different within a 401(k). 1b. Yes. 401(k)'s are made up of the same underlying assets that you could invest in with a regular brokerage account. I would always recommend the intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham the mentor of warren buffet once you have a basic knowledge ie what is a share bond guilt etc  In terms of pure investment the UK is fairly similar the major difference is the simpler tax structure, ISA allowance and the more generous CGT regime. Congrats on finishing your time and starting school.  I recommend reading the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.  Other than being a great basic investing book, it highlights a shift from actively managed brokerage accounts.  If you want to be an IB, it is important to understand the market you are getting into (and the different changing aspects of it).  As for further reading / prep, start learning about the Series 7, 63, 66 exams.  Become comfortable with finances and never stop reading.  Good luck! An investment trust is quoted just like a share. You just compare what you paid (your book cost) with its current share price, not the NAV, as a trust's price can be at a premium greater than the actual share price or a discount. Look for recommendations for textbooks, then, and buy them used online (amazon, to start - but there are other websites).   I bought Fabozzi's text after watching the Robert Shiller youtube course on finance (he uses that text, I believe). I’ll start with what worked for me, to get me hooked. This list is by no means exhaustive.   *One Up On Wall Street* by Peter Lynch discusses competitive advantages and staying close to the story of a business. Explores the concept of ‘buy what you know’. He has also written *Beating the Street*.  *The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives* by Leonard Mlodinow is not dissimilar to *A Random Walk Down Wall Street*, but I preferred this book as it explores the concepts of randomness and survivors bias.   *Against the Gods* by Peter Bernstein is a dense book, but in my opinion is the definitive text on the development of numbers, probability theory, and risk management. I absolutely love this book.   *The Most Important Thing* by Howard Marks is immensely readable, enjoyable, and looks at value investing for the long run. Howard Marks has been a macro behavioural investor before behavioural investing was a thing.   Speaking of behavioural biases, *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman is a spectacular look at how your brain’s quick-trigger responses can often be wrong.  On the subject of behaviour and biases, *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion* by Robert Cialdini is another topic-defining book  More books by long term veteran professional investment managers that should be enjoyed: - *The Little Book That (Still) Beats the Market* by Joel Greenblatt - *Beat the Crowd* by Ken Fisher - *Big Money Thinks Small* by Joel Tillinghast - *Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits* by Philip A. Fisher - *The Little Book of Behavioural Investing* by James Montier - *Margin of Safety* by Seth Klarman  And I’ll be banned from this forum without mentioning *The Intelligent Investor* by Benjamin Graham.    As per some other comments, my personal opinion is that books that describe events or periods of time like *Liars’ Poker* [80s Junk Bonds], *The Big Short* [Financial Crisis], *When Genius Failed* [the LTCM collapse, excellent read by Rogers Lowenstein], *All The Devils Are Here* [by McLean and Nocera, another Financial Crisis book, much better than Lewis’s, IMO] are all educational and quite entertaining, but don’t honestly have much to do with the actual nuts and bolts of the real financial industry.   Enjoy! You are smart to read books to better inform yourself of the investment process.  I recommend reading some of the passive investment classics before focusing on active investment books: If you still feel like you can generate after-tax / after-expenses alpha (returns in excess of the market returns), take a shot at some active investing.  If you actively invest, I recommend the Core & Satellite approach: invest most of your money in a well diversified basket of stocks via index funds and actively manage a small portion of your account.  Carefully track the expenses and returns of the active portion of your account and see if you are one of the lucky few that can generate excess returns. To truly understand a text like The Intelligent Investor, you need to understand finance and accounting.  For example, the price to earnings ratio is the equity value of an enterprise (total shares outstanding times price per share) divided by the earnings of the business.  At a high level, earnings are just revenue, less COGS, less operating expenses, less taxes and interest.  Earnings depend on a company's revenue recognition, inventory accounting methods (FIFO, LIFO), purchase price allocations from acquisitions, etc.  If you don't have a business degree / business background, I don't think books are going to provide you with the requisite knowledge (unless you have the discipline to read textbooks).  I learned these concepts by completing the Chartered Financial Analyst program. "I use TIAA-Cref for my 403(b) and Fidelity for my solo 401(k) and IRAs.  I have previously used Vanguard and have also used other discount brokers for my IRA. All of these companies will charge you nothing for an IRA, so there's really no point in comparing cost in that respect.  They are all the ""cheapest"" in this respect. Each one will allow you to purchase their mutual funds and those of their partners for free.  They will charge you some kind of fee to invest in mutual funds of their competitors (like $35 or something).  So the real question is this: which of these institutions offers the best mutual and index funds.  While they are not the worst out there, you will find that TIAA-Cref are dominated by both Vanguard and Fidelity.  The latter two offer far more and larger funds and their funds will always have lower expense ratios than their TIAA-Cref equivalent.  If I could take my money out of TIAA-Cref and put it in Fidelity, I'd do so right now. BTW, you may or may not want to buy individual stocks or ETFs in your account.  Vanguard will let you trade their ETFs for free, and they have lots.  For other ETFs and stocks you will pay $7 or so (depends on your account size).  Fidelity will give you free trades in the many iShares ETFs and charge you $5 for other trades.  TIAA-Cref will not give you any free ETFs and will charge you $8 per trade. Each of these will give you investment advice for free, but that's about what it's worth as well.  The quality of the advice will depend on who picks up the phone, not which institution you use.  I would not make a decision based on this." "This is the textbook for the course. Probably a little excessive for a casual purchase lol but it literally has everything you would ever need to know about trusts and is like ~1500 pages. Even goes into tax and what isn't a trust relationship for example corporation's assets and other interesting stuff.   https://www.amazon.com/Loring-Rounds-Trustees-Handbook-2017/dp/145487158X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1507755967&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=trusts+charles+rounds  As far as other sources go I don't really think I am in a position to recommend much as I am still learning. This website: https://www.quimbee.com/activity ; covers a bunch of basic law school courses in general. but again, its a paid subscription but I think it is only like $15 a month. I use it all the time to help me practice and learn the concepts better for various subjects. I'm a 3L now and that website has helped me and also a ton of my friends and has videos which I find much more helpful than just reading walls and walls of legal text. If you did the ""Wills, Trusts, and Estates"" section, that alone is probably worth the $15 monthly fee. I can even refer you and get a $25 amazon giftcard apparently lol" Investopedia does have tutorials about investments in different asset classes. Have you read them ? If you had heard of CFA, you can read their material if you can get hold of it or register for CFA. Their material is quite extensive and primarily designed for newbies.  This  is one helluva book and advice coming from persons who have showed and proved their tricks. And the good part is loads of advice in one single volume. And what they would suggest is probably opposite of what you would be doing in a hedge fund. And you can always trust google to fish out resources at the click of a button. "This Stack Exchange site is a nice place to find answers and ask questions. Good start! Moving away from the recursive answer... Simply distilling personal finance down to ""I have money, I'll need money in the future, what do I do"", an easily digestible book with how-to, multi-step guidelines is ""I Will Teach You To Be Rich"". The author talks about setting up the accounts you should have, making sure all your bills are paid automatically, saving on the big things and tips to increase your take home pay. That link goes to a compilation page on the blog with many of the most fundamental articles. However, ""The World’s Easiest Guide To Understanding Retirement Accounts"" is a particularly key article. While all the information is on the free blog, the book is well organized and concise.  The Simple Dollar is a nice blog with frugal living tips, lifestyle assessments, financial thoughts and reader questions. The author also reviews about a book a week. Investing - hoping to get better returns than savings can provide while minimizing risk. This thread is an excellent list of books to learn about investing. I highly recommend ""The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing"" and ""The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need"". The world of investment vehicles is huge but it doesn't have to be complicated once you ignore all the fads and risky stuff. Index mutual funds are the place to start (and maybe end). Asset allocation and diversification are themes to guide you. The books on that list will teach you." I rather like The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson. This comes in several formats. There's a video version, a written version (ISBN-13: 978-1594201929), and an audio version. This book covers the history of financial instruments. It covers the rise of money, the history of bonds and stocks, insurance and hedge funds, real-estate, and the spread of finance across the world. It is a great introduction to finance, though its focus is very definitely on the history. It does not cover more advanced topics, and will not leave you with any sort of financial plan, but it's a great way to get a broad overview and historical understanding of money and markets. I strongly recommend both the video and the written or audio version. Those are the three books that were considered fundamental at my university: Investments - Zvi Bodie (Author), Alex Kane (Author), Alan Marcus (Author), Stylianos Perrakis (Author), Peter Ryan (Author) This book covers the basics of financial markets. It explains how markets work, general investing principles, basic risk notions, various types of financial instruments and their characteristics and portfolio management principles. Futures and Options markets - John C. Hull This book goes more in depth into derivatives valuation and the less common / more complex instruments. The Handbook of Fixed Income Securities This books covers fixed income securities. In all cases, they are not specifically math-oriented but they do not shy away from it when it is called for. I have read the first and the other two were recommended by professors / friends now working in financial markets. Stop with all the stupid big words. You sound really pretentious. Just learn your 3 statements from accounting coach and learn statement analysis from streetofwalls.  If you're interested into valuation, streetofwalls is a good primer for DCF/public comps/M&amp;A comps/scenario analysis (LBO), but if you want to literally build out the model, Joshua Rosenbaum's investment banking valuation book is great. Everyone in banking I know used it to learn valuation You are not limited in these 3 choices. You can also invest in ETFs, which are similar to mutual funds, but traded like stocks. Usually (at least in Canada), MERs for ETFs are smaller than for mutual funds.