Is there a good book that talks about all the type of products to invest?
There is no magical book that talks about the thousands of investment instrument types that are available ranging from brown fields land up to CDS futures and beyond. In addition to the huge number the depth of understanding ranges from knowing that a security type exists all the way up to being able to mark the instrument to market for illiquid instances of the instrument. I have been in the industry for about six years and have a fair understanding of what I would term the basics of most security types (I cannot, for example, mark to market exotic options) but most of my knowledge has come from using these instruments on a daily basis and Investopedia. The basis of my knowledge has come from the CFA Claritas Investment certificate book when I took that exam (and CFA Level 1 but I'd recommend against reading that unless you are taking the exam) and Paul Wilmott's texts on Quantitative finance; mostly Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance 2nd Edition. tl;dr: you can't get a good grounding on all security types ; there are far too many. To get a good grounding in the most used takes a lot of effort, much more than a book will give you.
The book HOLD: How to Find, Buy, and Rent Houses for Wealth by Chader et al. was one of the best I've read on the subject. It has all of the basics, explanations, examples, and gives you real-life assumptions for your inputs when you do your analysis. It does contain some less-relevant information now that was more realistic before 2007, but it's a worthwhile read (or listen). They have some good starter worksheets, as well, on their website to help you do your analysis, which I found useful despite already having my own. "A lot of investors prefer to start jumping into tools and figuring out from there, but I've always said that you should learn the theory before you go around applying it, so you can understand its shortcomings.  A great starting point is Investopedia's Introduction to Technical Analysis. There you can read about the ""idea"" of technical analysis, how it compares to other strategies, what some of the big ideas are, and quite a bit about various chart patterns (cup and handle, flags, pennants, triangles, head & shoulders, etc). You'll also cover ideas like moving averages and trendlines. After that, Charting and Technical Analysis by Fred McAllen should be your next stop. The material in the book overlaps with what you've read on Investopedia, but McAllen's book is great for learning from examples and seeing the concepts applied in action. The book is for new comers and does a good job explaining how to utilize all these charts and patterns, and after finishing it, you should be ready to invest on your own.  If you make it this far, feel free to jump into Fidelity's tools now and start applying what you've learned. You always want to make the connection between theory and practice, so start  figuring out how you can use your new knowledge to generate good returns.  Eventually, you should read the excellent reference text Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets by John Murphy. This book is like a toolbox - Murphy covers almost all the major techniques of technical analysts and helps you intuitively understand the reasoning behind them. I'd like to quote a part of a review here to show my point:  What I   like about Mr. Murphy is his way of showing and proving a point. Let   me digress here to show you what I mean: Say you had a daughter and   wanted to show her how to figure out the area of an Isosceles   triangle. Well, you could tell her to memorize that it is   base*height/2. Or if you really wanted her to learn it thoroughly you   can show her how to draw a parallel line to the height, then join the   ends to make a nice rectangle. Then to compute the area of a rectangle   just multiply the two sides, one being the height, the other being   half the base. She will then ""derive"" this and   ""understand"" how they got the formula. You see, then she can   compute the area under a hexagon or a tetrahedron or any complex   object. Well, Mr. Murphy will show us the same way and   ""derive"" for us concepts such as how a resistance line later   becomes a support line! The reson for this is so amusing that after   one reads about it we just go ""wow..."""" Now I understand why   this occurs"". Murphy's book is not about strategy or which tools to use. He takes an objective approach to describing the basics about various tools and techniques, and leaves it up to the reader to decide which tools to apply and when. That's why it's 576 pages and a great reference whenever you're working.  If you make it through and understand Murphy, then you'll be golden. Again, understand the theory first, but make sure to see how it's applied as well - otherwise you're just reading without any practical knowledge. To quote Richard Feynman: It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.  Personally, I think technical analysis is all BS and a waste of time, and most of the top investors would agree, but at the end of the day, ignore everyone and stick to what works for you. Best of luck!" 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 I'm going to be a bit off topic and recommend 'The Only Investment Book You'll Ever Need' by Andrew Tobias. It doesn't start with describe the workings of the stock market. Instead, it starts with making sure you have a budget and have your basic finances in order BEFORE going into the stock market. This may not sound like what you are looking for, but it really is a valuable book to read, even if you think you are all set up in that department. 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! 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. I'm going to have to agree with /u/LupusSuperius. That's too broad. I think you should go for economics, that'll cover most of your interests. Then do some reading on investment​.  I don't have any recommendations for you, though. Hopefully someone will pitch in. So, first -- good job on making a thorough checklist of things to look into. And onto your questions -- is this a worthwhile process? Even independent of specific investing goals, learning how to research is valuable. If you decided to forgo investing in stocks directly, and chose to only invest in index funds, the same type of research skills would be useful. (Not to mention that such discipline would come in handy in other fields as well.) What other 80/20 'low hanging fruit' knowledge have I missed? While it may not count as 'low hanging fruit', one thing that stands out to me is there's no mention of what competition a company has in its field. For example, a company may be doing well today, but you may see signs that it's consistently losing ground to its competition. While that alone may not dissuade you from investing, it may give you something to consider.  Is what I've got so far any good? or am I totally missing the point. Your cheat sheet seems pretty good to me. But a lot depends on what your goals are. If you're doing this solely for your education and experience, I would say you've done well. If you're looking to invest in a company that is involved in a field you're passionate about, you're on the right track. But you should probably consider expanding your cheat sheet to include things that are not 'low hanging fruit' but still matter to you.  However, I'd echo the comments that have already been made and suggest that if this is for retirement investments, take the skills you've developed in creating your cheat sheet and apply that work towards finding a set of index funds that meet your criteria.  Otherwise happy hunting! Not sure why people are suggesting CFP or CFA to someone who hasn't graduated with a BS yet.   With that said, CFA had a claritas (fundamentals course) with like 20-20 page chapters going over basic finance and investment info. Pretty sure you can still get those pdfs for free. Investopedia is also great for general concepts for banking and investments.   CFA is very expensive and I wouldn't touch it until you've taken general business classes and really built up your foundation. I'll add Robert Shiller's [Irrational Exuberance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_Exuberance_(book) too, to summarize the recent era of Wall Street booms and busts.   The best books I've ever read on finance are [Nassim Taleb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)'s. But they're mostly about his own analysis of financial phenomena, and they approach financial history mostly from that highly unique viewpoint. 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. 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. Aswath Damodaran's [Investment Valuation 3rd edition](http://www.amazon.com/Investment-Valuation-Techniques-Determining-University/dp/1118130731/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1339995852&amp;sr=8-12&amp;keywords=aswath+damodaran) (or save money and go with a used copy of the [2nd edition](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0471414905/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&amp;condition=used))  He's a professor at Stern School of Business. His [website](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/) and [blog](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/) are good resources as well. [Here is his support page](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/Inv3ed.htm) for his Investment Valuation text. It includes chapter summaries, slides, ect. If you're interested in buying the text you can get an idea of what's in it by checking that site out. "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." "You don't. No one uses vanilla double entry accounting software for ""Held-For-Trading Security"".  Your broker or trading software is responsible for providing month-end statement of changes.  You use ""Mark To Market"" valuation at the end of each month.  For example, if your cash position is -$5000 and stock position is +$10000, all you do is write-up/down the account value to $5000.  There should be no sub-accounts for your ""Investment"" account in GNUCash.  So at the end of the month, there would be the following entries:"