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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

Can't edit my earlier comment, so making a new one: There are quite a few people on HN who are great at Economics and Finance. Could someone recommend some courses and texts (and hopefully a "path") for a complete beginner to understand it? I'd like to be able to better understand things like the FT and all the stats that CNBC shows me etc. Also hopefully get skilled enough to start investing in the market. Not to mention, broad economical trends and projections etc. Thanks!

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Have recommended that before: CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) preparation materials. You can buy used ones for cheap as they lose their value extremely fast for people preparing for the exam, but small changes of accounting regulations should not concern you if you are reading just to educated yourself.

They might seem overwhelming, but I am yet to find another set of books with such neatly organized and concentrated material on Economics and Finance.

Thanks, will check them out.

> broad economical trends and projections

Any good Economics Text book will do: like Principles of Economics/ Principles of Microeconomics, Gregory Mankiw

You can also try, although, personally I have not taken these:

https://www.coursera.org/course/microecon

https://www.coursera.org/learn/principles-of-macroeconomics

> FT and all the stats that CNBC shows me

For Investment valuation and Corporate Finance Damodaran is one of the best sources:

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/

Visit his blog, read his books. He has online classes as well

Also you can try, (I've not taken this course): https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets

For Value Investing, Benjamin Graham is a classic:

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Invest...

> For Technical Analysis and Futures Trading though, there are tonnes of books. May be you can start with these:

http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Analysis-Financial-Markets-C...

http://www.amazon.com/Options-Futures-Other-Derivatives-Edit...

And lastly,

> combine my CS background with Finance and do something interesting in it

https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational-investing

Fantastic. Thanks for this!

Damodaran and Graham are fantastic, as is Shiller's Financial Markets. His 2008 course on Open Yale was an early spark in my career.

After a quick look at the "Technical Analysis" book preview on Amazon, I would caution that technical analysis is generally a rorschach test of humans finding patterns in data when there really aren't any. Skip that one.

https://www.coursera.org/course/money https://www.coursera.org/course/money2 I took the first of these and intend to take the second, which I think came out as Coursera's top course at one point. There's a lot to learn here about what money is and how banks operate. That necessarily involves a historical perspective.

What do you mean by FT? "Financial Technology" or "Futures Trading"?

Financial Technology, but I guess Future Tradings would also be something I would want to learn? I'm at the beginner stage where I don't know what I need to know!

But my long term goal is to combine my CS background with Finance and do something interesting in it, if that makes any sense.

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