Ask HN: Introductory Finance for Hackers | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Introductory Finance for Hackers

Are there any good resources that go over the basics of finance/what goes on inside big financial institutions? I'm curious and couldn't find a good intro.

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Some book recommendations here:

http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/cji/890-11/Goldman-Sachs-Sug...

If you don't track your personal spending, start now. Your life is a little business. If you save 25x your annual spending and invest it properly, you can declare financial independence, withdraw 4% a year, and live off your investments FOREVER.

I used to run Profit & Loss (P&L) statements for projects at a corporation and first learned the basics that way, but the paragraph above is what really opened my eyes. Once you have skin in the game the numbers become far more meaningful.

>If you don't track your personal spending, start now. Your life is a little business. If you save 25x your annual spending and invest it properly, you can declare financial independence, withdraw 4% a year, and live off your investments FOREVER.

Factually this is not guaranteed. Highly likely, yes, but its not a "truth" so to speak. This is financial advice calibrated to historal returns. Besides that, not everyone wants to life as frugal as a homeless person for 20 years. A lot of people will regret it.

Agree with you on the frugality bit. Take a look at fatFIRE, a community of people who save aggressively to retire early but still enjoy a relatively lavish lifestyle after retirement.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/

My savings target is about $6MM. I won't need to live like a 'homeless person' as you say when I get there.

I'm neither a writer nor a finance pro, but I've been investing for myself for about 30 years. I wrote these posts for my kids so they could learn from my mistakes as well as what I learned along the way.

https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-fi...

See

https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market-Microstructu...

for the securities side of the industry and

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470095008/

for banks that take deposits and make loans.

Double entry bookkeeping seems like a good place to start to develop a conceptual understanding of accounting, and it's a useful skill too.

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