Learning investment--books to read? Fundamental/Value/Motley Fool
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 learned most of this stuff from 3 textbooks in school probably totaling $900 between the 3. I imagine you don't want to spend the cash on that. I would suggest finding a source online. A lot of the surface level stuff you are looking for can be found online on websites like Investopedia. They are a great resource and are free usually. Well, that is why I am asking questions, and seeing if there is any catch. I want to read up before I actually trade. Before I trades stocks I read for like 2 years, learning as much as I could. I am not about to jump in, but it is something I would like to trade eventually. I know I need to do my due diligence on it. The reason I came here was to get information on the topic before I decided on anything, including books and websites. I recall the name Martin Pring. As my fundamental analysis book from grad school was the work of Graham and Dodd titled Security Analysis, Pring was the author of the books I read on technical analysis. If you've not read his work, your education has a ways to go before you hit the tools. Don't be ridiculous. You are competing with the best graduates out of the harvards in the world and you think reading a couple self help financial books will put you on level playing field? Don't waste your time with bcg or McKinsey. "What part of finance does he want to get into? Investments, Equities and trading, derivatives, finance as a whole, corporate finance? Most academic textbooks are ridiculously priced so if he is looking to learn technical skills he might have to look at splashing out or looking elsewhere...  Fundamentals of Corporate Finance 7th is a good one. Covers a lot of the core parts of finance which then extend to all the other areas of finance, starting at the basics of Time Value of Money (though it does gloss over some of the more complex parts). However, it is pretty expensive. This is an academic textbook.  On the non-technical side, there are a number of books with which he could get started. Benjamin Graham's ""The Intelligent Investor"" is a popular and affordable one, but it won't teach much about the technical side of finance." I really like Value Investing by Bruce Greenwald. It's not a textbook so you can probably pick it up for about $20. While it is dense, I think with some patience you might be able to understand it at the undergrad level. The process outlined in the VI book is very different from the conventional corp finance way of valuing a company.  A typical corp finance model would probably have you model cash flows 5 or 10 years out and then assume some sort of terminal growth. The VI book argues that it's nearly impossible to predict things that far out accurately so build your valuation on what we know. Start with the balance sheet. Then look at this year's earnings. Is that sustainable?  This is a simplification of course but I describe it only so you can get the idea. I think it's definitely a worthwhile read. First The Intelligent Investor and then the 1962 edition Security Analysis - which is out of print, you can get it on Amazon.com used or ebay. Then you can read the edition backward but the 1962 edition is the best - IMHO. And don't forget The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham and  Benjamin Graham on Value Investing by Jane Lowe As a follow-up, I ended up buying:    * Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity (Pignataro, Paul; Hardcover)     * Mergers, Acquisitions, Divestitures, and Other Restructurings, + Website (Pignataro, Paul; Hardcover)     * The Essential CFO: A Corporate Finance Playbook (Nolop, Bruce P.; Paperback) Reading financial statements is important, in the sense that it gives you a picture of whether revenues and profits are growing or shrinking, and what management thinks the future will look like. The challenge is, there are firms that make computers read filings for them and inform their trading strategy. If the computer thinks the stock price is below the growth model, it's likely to bid the stock up. And since it's automated it's moving it faster than you can open your web browser. Does this mean you shouldn't read them? In a sense, no. The only sensible trading strategy is to assume you hold things for as long as their fundamentals exceed market value. Financial statements are where you find those fundamentals. So you should read them. But your question is, is it worth it for investors? My answer is no; the market generally factors information in quickly and efficiently. You're better off sticking to passive mutual funds than trying to trade. The better reason to learn to read these filings is to get a better sense of your employer, potential employers, competitors and even suppliers. Knowing what your margins are, what your suppliers margins and acquisitions are, and what they're planning can inform your own decision making. "Thanks!  I came across many books on credit risk in my google searches - what I'm really looking for is which one is the ""industry standard"" reading (does that make sense?). For example, in derivatives, everybody recommends John C. Hull's Options... book. Why of all the CRM books, do you recommend those three in particular?" "Wow,  I cannot believe this is a question.  Of course reading the 10Ks and 10Qs from the SEC are incredibly beneficial.  Especially if you are a follower of the investing gurus such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Shelby Davis.  Personally I only read the 10K's I copy the pertinent numbers over to my spreadsheets so I can compare multiple companies that I am invested in.  I'm sure there are easier ways to obtain the data.  I'm a particular user of the discounted free cash flow methodology and buying/selling in thirds. I feel like management that says what they are going to do and does it (over a period of years) is something that cannot be underestimated in investing.  yes, there are slipups, but those tend to be well documented in the 10Qs.  I totally disagree in the efficient market stuff.  I tend to love using methodologies like Hewitt Heisermans "" It's Earnings that Count"" you cannot do his power-staircase without digging into the 10Qs.  by using his methodology I have several 5 baggers over the last 5 years and I'm confident that I'll have more.  I think it is an interesting factoid as well that the books most recommended for investing in stocks on Amazon all advocate reading and getting information from 10Ks.   The other book to read is Peter Lynch's one-up-wall-street.  The fact is money manager's hands are tied when it comes to investing, especially in small companies and learning over the last 6 years how to invest on my own has given me that much more of my investing money back rather than paying it to some money manager doing more trades than they should to get commision fees." "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." In the intro to the Big Short, the author talks about how he wrote liars poter to steer people away from wall street, but in the end it became a manual for how to work there.  I am not trying to steer you away, or towards anything except the facts. If you want to do well in something, the best idea is to understand it; warts and all. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/most-important-finance-books-2017-1  Bloomberg, finacial times, chat with traders, calculated risk, reuters, wsj, cnbc(sucks), bnn (if canadian)  Audio books on youtube helped me read a lot of finance books in a short amount of time, listen while working out.  One thing that helped me stand out at my student terms (4th year here) was learning outside of the classroom and joining an investment club. Learning programming can help if thats a strength, but its really not needed and  it can waste time if yoi wont reach a point to build tools.  Other than that at 18 you have more direction than i did, good luck! "You're right, the asset allocation is one fundamental thing you want to get right in your portfolio.  I agree 110%.  If you really want to understand asset allocation, I suggest any and all of the following three books, all by the same author, William J. Bernstein. They are excellent – and yes I've read each.  From a theory perspective, and being about asset allocation specifically, the Intelligent Asset Allocator is a good choice.  Whereas, the next two books are more accessible and more complete, covering topics including investor psychology, history, financial products you can use to implement a strategy, etc.  Got the time? Read them all. I finished reading his latest book, The Investor's Manifesto, two weeks ago.  Here are some choice quotes from Chapter 3, ""The Nature of the Portfolio"", that address some of the points you've asked about.  All emphasis below is mine. Page 74: The good news is [the asset allocation   process] is not really that hard:  The   investor only makes two important   decisions: Page 76: Rather, younger investors should own a   higher portion of stocks because they   have the ability to apply their   regular savings to the markets at   depressed prices.  More precisely,   young investors possess more ""human capital"" than financial capital;   that is, their total future earnings   dwarf their savings and investments.    From a financial perspective, human   capital looks like a bond whose   coupons escalate with inflation.      Page 78: The most important asset allocation   decision is the overall stock/bind   mix; start with age = bond allocation   rule of thumb. [i.e. because the younger you are, you already have bond-like income from anticipated employment earnings; the older you get, the less bond-like income you have in your future, so buy more bonds in your portfolio.] He also mentions adjusting that with respect to one's risk tolerance.  If you can't take the ups-and-downs of the market, adjust the stock portion down (up to 20% less); if you can stomach the risk without a problem, adjust the stock portion up (up to 20% more). Page 86: [in reference to a specific example where two assets that zig and zag are   purchased in a 50/50 split and adjusted back to targets]     This process, called ""rebalancing,""   provides the investor with an   automatic buy-low/sell-high bias that over the long run usually –   but not always – improves returns. Page 87: The essence of portfolio construction   is the combination of asset classes   that move in different directions at   least some of the time. Finally, this gem on pages 88 and 89: Is there a way of scientifically picking the very best future   allocation, which offers the maximum   return for the minimum risk?  No, but   people still try.   [...   continues with description of   Markowitz's ""mean-variance analysis""   technique...]   It took   investment professionals quite a while   to realize that limitation of   mean-variance analysis, and other   ""black box"" techniques for allocating   assets. I could go on quoting relevant pieces ... he even goes into much detail on constructing an asset allocation suitable for a large portfolio containing a variety of different stock asset classes, but I suggest you read the book :-)"