(Part 2) Top products from r/finance
We found 40 product mentions on r/finance. We ranked the 276 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
21. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
Wall StreetWashingtonFinancial SystemMoneyBanks
22. Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
23. Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics, and Econometrics of Securities Trading
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
24. You Can Be a Stock Market Genius: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Touchstone Books
25. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Penguin Books
26. Hedge Fund Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Wiley
27. Distressed Debt Analysis: Strategies for Speculative Investors
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Used Book in Good Condition
28. The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster (Studies in Macroeconomic History)
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
29. Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers (Second Edition)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
30. The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
Crown Business
31. Understanding Wall Street, Fifth Edition (Understanding Wall Street (Paperback))
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
McGraw-Hill
32. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
John Wiley Sons
34. Market Wizards, Updated: Interviews with Top Traders
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
John Wiley Sons
35. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 2
Random House Trade
36. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 2
38. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story, Updated with New Epilogue
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
GlossaryIndex
39. The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition)
Sentiment score: 2
Number of reviews: 2
This classic text is annotated to update Graham's timeless wisdom for today's market conditions...The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham, taught and inspired people worldwide.Graham's philosophy of "value investing" -- which shields investors from substantial error...
If you are genuinely interested in the markets, this book is a great place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor. For context, this was written by Warren Buffett's teacher, in which class Buffett got an A+.
Another great book is "You can be a stock market genius", by the prominent hedge fund investor, Joel Greenblatt. Yes, the title is sensationalist, but the book is full of great fundamentals in stock market investing: http://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Stock-Market-Genius/dp/0684840073
As far as advice - be wary of anything that looks too good to be true. Most of the safest and surest money is made from being thoughtful and patient. Reading these somewhat dense books is a great start that lots of people skip..
Best of luck!
Do you mind a quick story?
I was a triple finance major. My university offered a series of courses that allowed me to get degrees in corporate financial management, commercial bank management, and investment science & portfolio management. They taught me that "if you crunch all the numbers, you can definitely get the 'right' answer for what a stock is worth."
I served as the president of the investment club for 2 years - we had $500k in real money and we had beat the S&P by over 2% every year since the fund started.
Here's the BIG part they missed (so much for a finance degree I guess).
Timing... is... everything.
I had bought NuSkin enterprises personally sometime early in the year. I think I roughly doubled my money and figured it was a good stock, so it should be bought. Not having been taught that timing matters, I recommended it to the investment club. Needless to say, it was NOT a good buy... at least, not at that price.
The club lost a little money on it but I learned a valuable lesson. Timing matters.
My friend went to Chicago to be a technical trader and I became a financial advisor. Eventually I learned that 'trading' was not a sin, even though it was taboo in school. Buy a good stock at a bad price - bad trade. Buy a terrible stock at a bargain - moolah!
I think it's great that you're trying to get a foundation for investing, but keep in mind that investing IS really about timing. Sure, you can crunch the numbers, but if you can't look at a chart and say "it's not a good time to buy" then it's all meaningless.
Try THIS BOOK or find something like it. It's important to be able to read price charts and not just to crunch numbers. In fact, if you get good enough at reading the charts you won't need the numbers. Other people can calculate them and leave their footprints in the price charts for you to follow.
Then, of course, pick the book that interests you the most in your series. Then the one that interests you 2nd most. If you get bored with one, put it on a shelf and come back later.
There is no truth in those books, only stories - you make the truth in your own mind based on what you will perceive reading them.
Best of luck.
I think that a great first step would be to look outside of r/finance. This subreddit is really not advanced at all.
Yorn just recommended you an arbitrary portfolio and some very, very specific (and illiquid) assets. There's a multitude of things wrong with what he said but the biggest ones are:
He is right that you need to learn a lot to invest successfully. One of the first things you should learn is that you don't take unfounded investment advice.
Now, for my advice (which you should research heavily):
There are a few strategies that retail investors can implement if they would like to pursue active management of their portfolio.
These are:
Value - buying stocks that that are undervalued based on some fundamental factor (like earnings). Value is conducive to longer term holdings. This book, despite its dumb title, is a good primer.
Low volatility - Buying stocks with a low standard deviation of price returns. www.betaarbitrage.com Also conducive to long term holdings.
Momentum - Buying assets that have recently increased in price. Tougher to implement and requires more frequent trading, but can be done at the sector level (and across asset classes) through ETFs.
Also, be wary of the advice that index investing as your best/only option. The S&P500 has returned basically 0% in the last decade with 2 50% drawdowns. Not the type of characteristics I'd like to see in my portfolio.
Also, diversification means buying assets that are negatively correlated in bad times. Not just buying a lot of things.
EDIT: Just read below that you don't know what a mutual fund is. I like this book for an introduction to financial markets.
I am a physics PhD student who prepared for a quant transition and got an offer relatively soon after applying.
How much time do you have, where are you going to look, and from which university are your degrees? This book is an easy read, a bit American-centric. There are also books with preparation problems, I liked 1 2 3.
Play on your strengths - if you don't like programming just get a basic idea of how C++ work, and learn a lot of stochastic calculus if that's what you like. Eventually you should identify 1 or 2 areas which you like most and become strong in those. It's better to be so-so in some of the areas of the books above but beyond their level in 1-2 areas than being quite good at all of them but excel in none. Don't completely neglect any topic though - if you have no idea what a call option or a pointer are, you'll be in trouble. Don't neglect brainteasers.
Certain interesting areas are surprisingly ignored by those books, for example econometrics and machine learning. Good luck!
Check the links in the sidebar of /r/investing. Most people tell beginners to start with Khan Academy and reading the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. It is the guide Warren Buffet points everyone too, regardless of experience. Also, NASDAQ has a good resource here.
I own a condo and have experience in equities, bonds, and options and for what it's worth I'd point you towards the latter if you don't want to live in the home. I don't think of rental properties as good investments, all things considered. It may be worth getting professional advice from someone in real estate to talk through the scenario. The investment side of the scenario has pluses and minuses that are much more widely known.
Here's a (grossly simplified) article from CNN Money that looks at the two investment options. The average return for equities vs real estate was 13.4% to 8.6% from 1974 to 2004, according to the article. That's 56% higher for the markets!
Finally, I'll throw out a wild card if you like the idea of a tangible investment like a single family home or duplex -- check out buying a coin operated laundry business. They're cheap, they often qualify for SBA loans, and they provide lots of free cash flow. Businesses in high rental areas seem to do best. There are tons for sale all over the country and many on Craigslist. Here's an example. That's about as much as I know about these but I've done the numbers and some have 30% annual return on equity. It could be quite the little side business if things work out in your favor. Just a thought :)
I have an eccentric obsession with the oil/energy industry. Some of these books were mentioned already, but below are my absolute favorites:
If you're looking for a history of oil and gas check out The Prize, and The Frackers covers the more recent energy revolution. Oil 101 and Fundamentals of Investing in Oil and Gas deal more with the technical side.
I'm sure there are some good books on the matter, and hopefully someone else in this sub will have some recommendations for you as well.
Politics and economics make terrible bedfellows, but if you would like to know about policy making some historical books would probably be in order.
Lords of Finance
Piketty's Capital
Sorkin's Too Big to Fail
And most readers of this sub know that nearly anything by Michael Lewis is good, if a bit dramatized.
Really though, economic policy making is done mostly by politicians, or politically motivated economists. The politicians don't have a clue about economics, and the economists tend to be picked by the politicians for saying what the politicians like to hear.
This is more a political question than a finance question. The guys in finance don't really care who's in office as long as regulatory capture is still around.
I know it's a little... something, but Series 7 For Dummies actually does a really good job of covering the basics of what is traded and how.
I say this as an amateur economics nerd who just likes learning for the sake of it, you may well get better advice from the pros/students on here.
I saw another comment that you wanted to know how the trading floors were set up... that is really dependent on the firms. So long as you have a basic understanding of what the various desks do you should be fine.
I initially read The Intelligent Investor around the same time in my life and struggled getting through the whole book - you are definitely not alone in that aspect.
Although the book is considered by many to be 'the bible' on Value Investing this is not to say that it resonates as well, or at all, from those who approach the book from a technical analysis or quant basis etc. Given the stage you are currently at it would make more sense to spend time reading some smaller books on various investment styles to work out which resonates with you and then do a deeper dive into the relevant field.
In saying that - if you still feel inspired to work through The Intelligent Investor pick up the newer annotated version (http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661) which has some recent case studies/examples which tie Ben Graham's world a little more closely with 2016. If you are still finding it hard going just put the book down and come back to it in 6 months, it may be all you need or alternatively re-read it again (it took me till my second reading to really understand what was being said).
Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris is probably the best. It tends to lean toward Equities, but many of the concepts (market participants; economics; etc) are universal to all assets. The market structure itself tends to deviate for other assets, but this should give you enough of a baseline to know what else to search for if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole.
Second may be Empirical Market Microstructure by Joel Hasbrouck.
If you want something on more exotic asset types (STIRs or such) let me know.
Upvote for Series 7 for Dummies. I was skeptical at first, but I think it's the best book for supporting study material.
Again, the assets did have value -- markets just weren't operating.
It's like having a G6 private jet during the world's worst economic crisis in decades. It obviously has value, but there might not be a bid for it at any level if banks are collapsing and GDP is declining rapidly. If you're running low on cash and look to repo your G6 or sell it to raise cash to continue operating you would find yourself SOL. Again, it doesn't mean the jet is worthless nor that you are insolvent from a balance sheet perspective. It just means capital markets, credit markets, and markets in general are not open or operating.
Without access to liquidity, no one can survive in perpetuity. The Fed stepped in to provide this critical needed liquidity - partly because that's its job as lender as last resort, partly because it wanted to provide stability, and partly because it could afford to absorb these assets in the event they proved to be worthless / toxic. In reality they ended up being quite valuable and the Fed has generated mountains of profits off its various asset purchase / lending programs since the GFC.
This book explains it all in great detail, talks exclusively about the liquidity vs solvency status of Lehman, and also outlines the various Fed programs made available to institutions during the GFC. Would highly recommend it: https://www.amazon.com/Fed-Lehman-Brothers-Financial-Macroeconomic/dp/1108420966
[Fooling Some of the People All the Time] (http://www.amazon.com/Fooling-People-Complete-Updated-Epilogue/dp/0470481544) is a really good book on short selling.
[Quantitative Value] (http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Value-Web-Site-Practitioners/dp/1118328078) is a really good book as well.
If you can afford it, [Margin of Safety] (http://www.amazon.com/Margin-Safety-Risk-Averse-Strategies-Thoughtful/dp/0887305105/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415645406&sr=1-1&keywords=margin+of+safety) is the holy grail of value investors.
Top books to get into Finance and trading. This first one is by far the most fundamental book. Most jobs you get you will be asked to read this, and even if you aren't its still an amazing read. Published in 1931, still very relevant today, you will read 10+ times over your Finance career
Reminiscences of a stock operator
Then the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager
Market Wizards
Hedge Fund Market Wizards
The New Market Wizards
This is where I would start. GL
The Creature from Jekyll Island gives a comprehensive and fascinating account on the history, creation, and role of money. Plus, it's not dry or boring! From Amazon's description:
>Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magicians' secrets are unveiled. We get a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, their pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A dry and boring subject? Just wait! You'll be hooked in five minutes. Reads like a detective story — which it really is. But it's all true.
Admittedly, the author sometimes gets a little conspiracy-focused at times, but the book is well-researched with many citations.
This has been a fundamental of investment strategy for at least 40 years. So much so that you can read about the advantage of index funds over mutual funds in wikipedia.
Here's a lay article from Wharton about it.
Here's an article from Money in 2008 that said that of the mutual funds they tracked, not a single one was profitable. Although dated, fundamentals haven't changed since then. (Hint: that a mutual fund beats its peers is not praise.)
Investment and lay financial publications routinely publish comparisons of mutuals to index funds. All of them are like the Money article.
The last I remember reading about mutuals the stats were something like: a huge percentage (something like 70-90%) of funds fail after 5-10 years, and of the ones that survive, most lose money. Of the ones that don't, only a few meet (much less beat) the market.
You need to remember that financial companies are not interested in making you money. They are interested in making themselves money. And your money doesn't just disappear. It goes to someone. (Whenever I say this I usually get howls from investment professionals.)
A simple test is to look at the annual returns of any company's funds. The numbers are dire.
In contrast, it's relatively easy to use a stock screener at a site like yahoo or google to identify any number of large caps that regularly pay dividends in excess of 10%. It requires a little work, but via dividend reinvestment a person literally can earn a fortune over time.
Anyone planning on putting money into the market needs to educate him/herself first. (And with much respect I don't mean by asking on reddit.) So here's what to do: start reading Barron's, Forbes, Investor's Business Daily, the WSJ, the Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha. Read them critically; don't just believe what they say. (As an example, I've never found the Motley Fool's suggested investments to be useful, although its analyses generally can be educational.) Here's a book, a very basic one, about the market.
Finally of course no needs to take my advice. I'm just some guy on reddit.
If you're looking for something more general then check out Market Wizards there's also a whole series with one of the books focused specifically on hedge funds.
I'm just about to start reading it myself so can't comment on it 100% but I recently listened to this podcast that features the author and he has some fascinating stories about various traders/managers so I can only imagine the book is similar in the quality of content.
The Quants is a pretty good read.
I think you need to specify whether or not you want academic oriented work or something that is more entertainment oriented. For the latter, any Michael Lewis Books (The Big Short, etc.) or David Einhorn's Book (Fooling Some of the People All of the Time) would be good.
Sounds like market microstructure. I don't know anyone working on the topics you mention specifically, but Maureen O'Hara at Cornell is a guru on MM. There is also this book on Empirical Market Microstructure and a survey paper by Biais, Glosten, and Spatt that might provide references for some of the areas you're interested in.
http://www.amazon.com/Distressed-Debt-Analysis-Strategies-Speculative/dp/1932159185
best book I've seen on the subject. I know there were pdf's floating around the internet a few years back if you don't want to buy it.
Part finance, part economics, I highly recommend Lords of Finance (https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800). It discusses the actions of several key people and subsequent events in the banking sector leading up to the Great Depression. Largely shaped our world today.
The situations you mention were all fairly different. No short explanation will give a good sense of what happened. I don't know that much about Amarath, but there are good books written about the other two.
There's an excellent book about the rise and fall of LTCM.
I don't think the definitive book on the mortgage crisis has been written yet, but Michael Lewis wrote one I thought was pretty informative.
> I'm looking at jobs in quantitative software engineering roles, like Jane Street, DE Shaw and Two Sigma.
Then brush up on your probability and statistics brainteasers. That, and algorithmic brainteasers (like things to do with linkedlists, arrays, etc).
Sample book is Heard on the Street by Crack or Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers by Joshi et al.
You don't need to know finance for Jane Street. They emphasize that...
You can be a stock market genius https://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Stock-Market-Genius/dp/0684840073
Deep Value https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Value-Investors-Contrarians-Corporations/dp/1118747968/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482441120&sr=1-1&keywords=deep+value
This list should give you a good start.
“Day Trading with Short-term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout” by Tony Crabel
Trader Vic: Methods of a Wall Street Master
You should probably read most of the books in this link.
Evidence Based Technical Analysis
And for the masochists, Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar
Renaissance mainly hires engineering/math/science PhDs to work on systematic strategies. They've made hires from people with backgrounds in subjects like NLP and information theory. Besides that, no one really knows what they do in their flagship fund.
However, in their equity fund RIEF (Renaissance Institutional Equities Funds ), they were actually very correlated with other quant equity funds during the quant crisis. You can see from this letter to investors that they were down 8.7% from August 1 to August 9th 2007
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/files/renaissance_technologies.pdf
"While we believe we have an excellent set of
predictive signals, some of these are undoubtedly shared by a number of long/short hedge funds. For one reason or another many of these funds have not been doing well, and certain factors have caused them to liquidate positions. "
During August of 2007, several multistrat hedge funds were facing losses in their credit portfolios and had to sell off their most liquid assets which were their holdings in their quant equity portfolios. At the time, many quant equity funds were trading on the same signals so they all started getting hit with losses from other quant funds selling similar portfolios. This forced more quant equity funds to liquidate their positions, creating a sell off which affected all the major quant equity funds ( Blackrock SAE, AQR, GSAM Global Alpha, etc.)
You can read more about this in the book, The Quants:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quants-Whizzes-Conquered-Destroyed/dp/0307453383
or from this paper:
http://web.mit.edu/Alo/www/Papers/august07.pdf
The economist has several good pieces on fat-tail risk in finance; if you don't have a subscription, use outline.com to get past the paywall.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2010/02/11/the-gods-strike-back
https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2010/02/16/fat-tails-illustrated
Also, Peter Bernstein's book "Against the Gods" is a history of risk through the ages. Might be good for your lit review.
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Stats & charts-wise, Factset's: Turbulence Adjusted Risk Fat-tail pdf (just google it)
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The Creature from Jekyll Island
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/091298645X/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/178-6230627-7590562
Take a look at the Market Wizards interview series.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118273044/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687742&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=1592802826&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=19SC26DDDBPPBS14FNS9
Some of these guys trade derivatives
If you are new to the game, use HL's.
If you require more depth, Moyer's book
Against the Gods - takes your from ancient games of risk to medieval life insurance to the Great Depression.
But Europe isn't a country. And not all of us are clueless yanks.
Anyway:
http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470442204.html
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0071497331
And if you read The Big Short or similar pop finance books, you'll get some of the lingo and thought processes.
Some lesser known titles:
/r/SecurityAnalysis maintain a decent reading list.
The following is taken from it:
History