Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems? - <AUTHOR> With all the craziness this week in the stock market I've become interested in learning about how money works in our society. Fiat currency, the federal reserve, the stock market, etc. Any good book recommendations? <comment><USER5> I have almost 10 years in the finance industry, both buyside and sellside and my take is that, while there are some fundamental principles at play, the world of finance is too messy and complicated for any one book to describe it. An even stronger statement I am willing to make is that no one person correctly and fully understands the financial system.

So, once you accept that there is no "correct" answer to how the financial system and how markets work, what's left to do is to follow what's happening in the world and try to build your own mental model.

One source I'm a big fan of (and has a bit of a cult following in the financial world) is Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" blog: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew- s-levine)

He's engaging, funny, talks about interesting topics and, most importantly, he's _rarely_ wrong. It's a rare thing seeing a journalist talk about your specialty subject and actually being correct.

Similar source is Felix Salmon: [https://www.felixsalmon.com/](https://www.felixsalmon.com/)

Similar league as Levine, but I find him slightly less engaging, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER6> Agreed that Money Stuff generally technically accurate. The only gripe I have about it is that it has a bias in the direction of "everything is so messed up / comical". This is an irreducible bias as it's the job of the journalist to make a topic seem engaging and interesting.

However, if you take the theme of Levine's articles too literally/thematically, you'll think that finance is filled with quirky rules that produces comically inefficient outcomes most of the time. You'll think that there are easy system changes that any layperson can see that would make the system run much better. You might even think that finance is clear swamp ready to be drained -- this plays into the confirmation bias of readers who come in already with the thesis that "the system is totally broken".

In fact, against this theme, 90% of the time the story is incredibly dry and uninteresting because the system works exactly as intended. 90%+ of the time, stock A + B bundled is worth exactly the sum of it's parts. 90%+ of the time, the regulations do protect investors, are cheap to check off, and causes no weird behavior. 90%+ of IPOs are textbook win-wins and not Adam Neumann playing Softbank or a sell-side banker eating grandma.

To be constructive though, what's the solution? Start with skimming over the most classical textbooks (Mankiw or the recommended non-heterodox textbooks from the relevant classes by your local colleges). This is the classical theory of both how things are supposed to work, and how 90% the value generation actually occurs in 90% of the cases.

<comment><USER7> I've always gotten the impression that under the jokes and sarcasm, Matt Levine _loves_ finance, though I agree that he focuses on the interesting in a way that might skew a layman's perception of the likelihood of various things happening.

<comment><USER8> He really does love it in an intellectual sense, which is an infectious passion that is hard to find in an industry where many are optimizing just for financial success.

As someone who accidentally got into finance as a software engineer, he more than anyone has made me really fall in love with the domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For learning I strongly recommend against almost all books mentioned in this thread. They don't really teach how financial systems work in the society or the underlying principles. They give you just a viewpoint. Some of them are good read after you know the basics.

You need to pick up real college textbook (or online course) and read the parts that interest you and skim other parts. Example: Introduction to Finance: Markets, Investments, and Financial Management by Melicher and Norton

You can also pick up introductory undergraduate college textbook in economics and read the parts that interest you. Greg Mankiw's books are good but the price is off the charts, so maybe don't buy them. (Macroeconomics & Financial Systems could be cheap if bought used)

After that some light reading for general audience with interesting viewpoints and lessons:

\- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Malkiel

\- Common Sense on Mutual Funds by John Bogle

\- The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros (Sorosls theory of reflexivity in finance, nontechnical take on nonlinear dynamics in the markets)

<comment><USER10> I recommend against Mankiw, and to be honest, macroeconomics as a whole. But particularly undergrad macroeconomics.

Undergrad macro textbooks are more or less designed to teach you how to work a model, and how to prove theorems about a model. But when all is said and done, macro tends not to go the distance and demonstrate how the model relates to the real world. They also get important details wrong. Most of the west doesn't work on a fractional reserve system anymore, and the main constraint for money creation is not the reserve ratio.

Honestly you'd be better off learning very basic accounting, then learning about bank balance sheets, then learning about basic financial plumbing like the repo market, money market funds, and the fed's operations.

I like Bruce Tuckman's book 'fixed income securities' for the latter. It's very practical, without any of the theoretical nonsense you sometimes encounter in advanced texts.

<comment><USER11> How is Tyler Cowen's textbook? I figured that'd be better.

<comment><USER10> Jesus fuck I'd stay away from anything that man writes. Honestly my advice is not to bother with academic macro at all. Or if you must, read it like a scientist. Demand evidence for every statement. Ask how one would actually measure whatever quantity is in question (e.g. a supply curve, when most of the time only price is observable).

There are a few financial journos that I have time for though. Matt Levine is good, though he has a particular domain of expertise and tends not to stray from it. Michael Pettis is good on all things China. But as others in the thread have also noted, the industry is so full of bullshit that it's hard to separate the good from the bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I studied economics in college, then I worked for a few years as a business journalist before I finally switched careers to IT systems engineering. The following is a list of my favorite books on financial securities, banking and investment theory. These books are generally comprehensible to anyone with an interest in the subject, regardless of their educational background.

Arrighi, Giovanni (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

Brealey, Myers, Allen (2011) Principles of Corporate Finance, 10th ed.

Bruck, Connie (1988) Predators' Ball: Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and Rise of Junk Bond Raiders

Fisher, Philip (2003) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings, 2nd ed.

Fridson, Martin and Fernando Alvarez (2002) Financial Statement Analysis, 3rd ed.

Graham, Benjamin, J. Zweig, D. Dodd (2006/08) Intelligent Investor, rev ed; Security Analysis, 6th ed.

Greenblatt, Joel (1999) You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

Greenwald, Kahn, Sonkin, Biema (2001) Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

Henwood, Doug (1997) Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom

Levitt, Arthur (2003) Take on the Street: How to Fight for Your Financial Future

Lewis, Michael (2010/1989) Big Short; Liar's Poker

Lynch, Peter and John Rothchild (2000) One Up on Wall Street, 2nd ed.

Mishkin, Frederic (2004) Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 7th ed.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005/10) Fooled by Randomness, 2nd ed.; Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed.

Vilar, Pierre (1976) A History of Gold and Money: 1450-1920

Tracy, John A. (2009) How to Read a Financial Report: Wringing Vital Signs out of the Numbers, 7th ed.

<comment><USER13> Good list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an online course, not a book, but it changed my understanding of finance. I studied Economics (initially) at university, and never found anything close to as useful as this class:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/money- banking](https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking)

<comment><USER15> Videos of one year's lectures are available on youtube, with links at here: [https://www.ineteconomics.org/education/courses/the- economic...](https://www.ineteconomics.org/education/courses/the-economics-of- money-banking)

I'm halfway through, and I'm really impressed not only by the prof's preparation but methods. Very clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhat meta comment, when I read all the conflicting recommendations here (seriously, for almost all recommendations there's an anti-recommendation somewhere in this thread), it makes me question the value to me in really trying to understand the financial system.

I mean, I'm not completely financially illiterate. I understand compound interest. I stick with sinking most of my money into passive investing, saving x months of expenses in checking for surprises, and not accumulating any debt.

Every now and then I think about getting back into value investing (it was fun in high school) which is a little more active, but the effort required to understand this system seems enormous/impossible. There are simplified expositions of how to read a balance sheet, but then I run into weird edge cases of financial trickery that I'd never be aware of. So I figure I can't compete with pros and passive investing seems like a reasonable enough approximation in the long run.

When I compare it to all of the other stuff I could learn or skills I could acquire in the same time, so far "learning about the financial system" is so _messy_ and uncertain to me that I never really pursue it.

Has anybody run into this issue? What did you decide?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I would make a distinction between learning about the financial system for investment purposes- which as a non-professional in that space I think is pointless- vs learning about to understand what's happening in the world.

Whatever domain you're in, whatever interests you have- having something of a model of the financial machinery that basically underlies all human activity, both in the small and in the large, I would argue is super valuable.

The space is ENORMOUS and incredibly complex and so one has to have a plan and some kind of motivation for carving a path through it, to be sure.

Hard to engage with more specifics without more context, happy to continue the conversation.

<comment><USER16> > Whatever domain you're in, whatever interests you have- having something of > a model of the financial machinery that basically underlies all human > activity, both in the small and in the large, I would argue is super > valuable.

What's strange is I'm generally in favor of "staying informed". But I typically skip most financial news. For example, looking at last week's issue of The Economist, there are several articles in the finance section. I summarized these below, but my reaction to most is "yup, sounds like the logic I saw in my first-year econ class".

Maybe my issue is that I rarely feel like I _learn_ anything from these articles; they mostly read as applications of basic theory that might work. In this case, my read on finance is there's a set of basic principles that explain most of the decisions made and then just beyond that lies an enormous set of more complex but also controversial material.

In contrast, I think of other areas as having a lot of "basic information" that I don't know, with the controversial bits much further out. So if I'm trying to accumulate useful and relatively uncontroversial info, finance is not the best place.

(Those summaries:

1\. interest rate cuts may not suffice to avert recession, governments may add in spending, tax cuts, and credit to banks to increase liquidity

2\. fear has led to price increases for safe haven assets like gold, bonds, and stable currencies and drops for economic activity trackers like oil and copper; share price changes have varied depending on debt levels and how different companies are expected to react to societal slowdowns

3\. might be a good idea to pivot between stocks and bonds as market rises or falls; downturns can be opportunities if your horizon is long enough

4\. if the economy slows, how should banks deal with reduced payment abilities, especially when they may be legally required to not have too many bad-looking liabilities?

5\. something about corporate bond trading [this one was most confusing]

6\. some special bonds offer yields to investors with the catch that if some defined disaster strikes the investors will not get money back; these bonds have not yet been useful to covid because of stringent conditions on duration and impact of the disaster before payout, and complications of prevention (countries who respond well may get paid less)

7\. covid has particularly hurt commodities markets, and by extension economies that rely on commodities (like Saudi Arabia))

<comment><USER17> Hear you- it sounds like you have a sufficiently rich mental model that the reports "make sense"\- some semantics/meaning are conveyed. They might even "sound obvious"\- why is X even news? Etc.

That's a tough place to be- on the usual models of learning curves for a practitioner that's right at the edge of transitioning out of beginner. A lot of people who are "book smart" are here.

In order to learn more, to actually get out of beginner stage, brains need to practice. They need to DO. You would need to find a problem to work on that causes you to _produce_ not just consume.

Does that make sense? Hope that's helpful and not offensive, all comments intended to be positive/growth mindset/supportive.

<comment><USER16> That makes sense. It's challenging to think of a "problem to work on". If it was programming or math, I'd find a project to try out whatever technique I'd picked up. There doesn't seem to be a ready analogue for that here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> First, arm yourself with the tools to figure out whether what you're reading is bullshit or not (unfortunately a huge issue in the finance space). Read about The Organon by Aristotle, particularly his work around logical fallacies.

Then, for a brief overview of the history of money, currency, and markets read the first part of William Bernstein's The Four Pillars of Investing (provides some good historical context).

To understand financial market movements in the short term (like what is happening now), read about crowd psychology, behavioral biases (Kahneman), and black swans (Taleb).

To understand financial markets over the long term, read anything written by Buffet (his annual reports) or Munger, or their intellectual precursor, Graham and Dodd.

To understand the theories and thinking underpinning money and central banking, read about Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Keynes, and Hayek.

Start with a bias toward history and older works, and move towards newer works to understand how the current zeitgeist got here and be able to think more critically about the ideas that are currently en vogue.

Also, I agree with the comment that recommends avoiding books by journalists. These are typically compelling narratives in search of supporting facts and theories (the wrong way to approach thinking). You should start your learning from the opposite position. Learn the theories and facts first, then think critically about any good-sounding narratives you see repeated in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER19> From someone working in the hedge fund world, "Big Debt Crises" by Ray Dalio is the most useful book I have read on the topic.

The language is quite accessible and it describes how various kinds of business cycles have played out through history. The highlight for me is an elaborate, punch-by-punch retelling of how the 3 major financial crises played out (1930s Germany, Great Depression and 2008). Rather than looking backward with the benefit of hindsight as most textbooks do, this gives you a real impression of how the events played out in real-time. There are even newspaper headline clippings in the margins from every week or so, just to show how the popular narrative was evolving as it happened.

<comment><USER20> Yeah I always find reading financial history materials, if they are authentic, really helps understanding a lot about the current situation. Guess our generation might have the privilege to go through a financial crisis and a depression. Hopefully not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the best online course I've ever taken:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/money- banking](https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking)

The professor explain the financial system very well using fairly recent and historic events.

</comment><comment><USER22> Get some conflicting ideas. Two great, short books are The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard (available for free here: [https://mises.org/library/mystery- banking](https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking)) and Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt (free here: [https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one- lesson/](https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/)). They both conflict quite substantially with the mainstream and might open up a whole new line of inquiry for you.

<comment><USER23> If you're going to read Hazlitt, do us the favor of reading John Quiggin's recent followup "Economics in Two Lessons":

[https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Two-Lessons-Markets- Badly-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Two-Lessons-Markets-Badly- ebook/dp/B07JQ676JQ)

"Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt's bestselling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can't explain why they often fail so badly—or what we should do when they stumble. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson quipped, "When someone preaches 'Economics in one lesson,' I advise: Go back for the second lesson." In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes—and failures—of free markets."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For a slightly different take, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. I would read some of the more direct recommendations here and then read Taleb to remind you that not everything is predictable or easily explainable.

<comment><USER25> The entire Incerto book series by Taleb (which includes Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) are awesome and they are talking about big catastrophic events like the current one. This pandemic is a classic Black Swan event: it's a surprise, it has a major impact and lots of experts will try to say that it was easily foreseeable in hindsight.

<comment><USER26> It's not a black swan, a pandemic was long on the horizon (think SATS, MERS, Ebola, ...).

Just to add: I found taleb pretty opionated and had trouble distinguishing his own opinions from facts/theories.. I'd not recommend his books.

<comment><USER27> I think it is. Not because there were other potential Pandemics but because of the timing of the Virus. Its comes at a time when social media is in widespread use which means misinformation spreads rapidly which also leads to panic. Generally, social media amplifies everything good and bad. A combination of these factors makes it a Black Swan event.

<comment><USER28> Instead of the expected pandemic when people were not going to use social media because...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surprised no one has mentioned "Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners".

Lots of people recommending Ernie Chan - and he is very big in the space but he uses 100 words when 10 will do its a hard time slogging through it.

De Prado is incredibly technical , if there was a De Prado cliff notes Id say read that.

And don't forget if you are coding this stuff up, lots of people have but those books into re-usable code on github.

<comment><USER30> Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ is about types of traders and market microstructure - it has very little to do with what OP asked for ("… how money works in our society. Fiat currency, the federal reserve, the stock market, etc.")

<comment><USER29> i embarrassingly didn't read the body, and I am also ignorant of those things i'll be reading this thread again , thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Part one of this book really helped with my understanding of monetary policy, very clear examples of how the price of money is expressed through Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Aggregate Price Levels and the interplay between these measures: [https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-Macroeconomics- Managers...](https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-Macroeconomics-Managers- Executives/dp/1422101797)

Here is a PDF of a diagram I made to help organize my understanding of this content: [https://www.lucidchart.com/publicSegments/view/e1d12ae5-a8a0...](https://www.lucidchart.com/publicSegments/view/e1d12ae5-a8a0-47cb-8e35-f9b079b8a2ab)

</comment><comment><USER32> Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson will start you from the very beginning, and does cover all the subjects you mentioned.

Random walk down wall street is good, but the angle is more "so you want to get into investing?" It won't go into too much detail of underlying systems like fiat currency.

</comment><comment><USER33> Debt: The First 5000 Years

[https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf](https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> Huge, huge topic. You will have to pick a path through the enormous jungle.

The starting point I would recommend is bottom up, through accounting and financial statements. Core knowledge, of both practical and intellectual value. Tons of books here, I particularly like

Thomas Ittelson - Financial Statements

Accessible, straightforward, friendly.

After that, any of the collections of

Warren Buffett's Letters to Shareholders

are both entertaining and intellectually valuable, and provide great insight. Read forward, eg, from his first letters in the 1960s, to now.

One of the realizations in the journey is that there are, and have been, a lot of different kinds of money- credit money and exchange money and asset money and so forth. A relatively abstract/intellectual but immensely useful survey is

The Nature of Money - Geoffrey Ingham

The concept of an asset is critical to the functioning of the financial system. New kinds of assets are created all the time. One of the best written books I have read recently goes into venture capital and debt asset creation:

The Code Of Capital - Katharina Pistor

The role of different kinds of money in history, especially US history, is absolutely fascinating. I am in the middle of

American Bonds - Sarah Quinn

and can recommend.

I do not especially recommend the Dalio books or Graeber's Debt or Ferguson's books. They are fine but I did not find them helping me build understanding. Not quite junk food, but definitely not protein.

I unfortunately have not found any of the books I have seen about the Federal Reserve to be worthy of recommending. My wife works there and so I have perhaps a unique perspective. But nothing conveys the challenge and the mechanics of what they do. Still looking. The papers the various Fed banks publish, as well as the papers published by the Bank of England, are uniformly outstanding.

Finally, some of the bitcoin people have written about money. Tho I am a believer in bitcoin I absolutely recommend against most of them, especially Saifedean Ammous's book. Do not read.

Good luck!

<comment><USER23> If Graeber's Debt didn't help you build understanding, then I'd respectfully suggest that you weren't trying to build a deep enough understanding.

Debt (the book) is not about our contemporary system (much) - it's an incredible work about the most basic elements of "financial systems" and how debt has shaped our cultures, economies and political systems over thousands of years.

Put differently, perhaps, it's a book about things the lie beneath what is covered in all the books you've mentioned.

<comment><USER17> Agree completely that it is an important work and enlightening- in terms of _perspective_. The socio/anthropological history of Debt is a very useful lens for the modern world.

That said, in terms of _understanding_ \- with all respect, I find it insufficient (MHO). Perspective, as Alan Kay says, is worth a lot of IQ points, but on its own is insufficient. The modern financial world is full of _machines_ (both software and people processes). Much of what happens is a result of mechanical inertia. The universe of sensible changes from a policy perspective is limited by the ergonomics and sympathies of the existing machines.

It has been a long time since I last read Debt but I remember feeling frustrated by an absence of coverage of the machines. My perception of his advocacy in recent years has been that he has been less effective than he might have been had he stronger command of the machines, and not just the policy.

One of my recs- Sarah Quinn- while like Graeber is also deep in the world of the sociology of money, is stronger technically. Her PhD thesis is an extremely helpful dive into the mortgage securitization world- the largest debt market in the world other than Treasuries- and my rec (American Bonds) so far is a popularization of that work.

I completely forgot, another excellent book on important machines that shape the modern financial world is

Payment Systems in the US - Carol Coye Benson

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson

The Long and Short of It - John Kay

A great place to look is the second hand study books for professional qualifications like the CFA, Chartered Banker and so on

<comment><USER35> Ascent of Money is indispensable as a foundation for the whys and hows of banking from it's origins and first principles. It's a history book.

Anything technical (mathematical finance) is really not going to provide a foundation without the historical _why_ of the instruments creation and use. One you have that, the most efficient way to understand it after would be with Quantlib ([https://www.quantlib.org/docs.shtml](https://www.quantlib.org/docs.shtml))

There is a lot of middle brow commentary (krugman, piketty, reinhard/rogoff, dalio, taleb, etc) that will be entertaining and philosophical, but only that. The guts of economics (Keynes, Galbraith, Mises/Hayek) are very dense, and provide a very narrow, depth first plunge into something you won't be able to apply well without a more complete education.

Functional grasp of (re)insurance, securitization, liquidity, and the bond/debt markets is the best royal road, I"d say.

<comment><USER36> I disagree that Taleb is "middle-brow", check out his new technical incerto book, from what I've heard its rather rigorous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you are looking for a shorter read, I would recommend "The money creation paradox" paper published by ING: [https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/Money_paradox2.pdf](https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/Money_paradox2.pdf)

I find fascinating that, despite the simplicity of the question, not every economist agrees on how this happens.

<comment><USER38> The vast majority of money is created by commercial banks. They are, largely, free to do so to whatever degree they deem fit, and the central bank adjusts reserves to match. Almost all money is debt, created by extending loans in this fashion. The textbooks are for the most part wrong. The money multiplier / fractional reserve banking / etc. information is completely wrong.

Don't believe me? Believe the Bank of England: [https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly- bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ray Dalio - How the Economy Works [https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0](https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0)

</comment><comment><USER40> If you're interested in fiat currency and the fed, I highly recommend the book Lords of Finance. The author does a really good job of showing just what central banks do and how their responses to economic events shape outcomes. The book entirely focuses on the Great Depression and the central banks of the USA/Europe but it's really well written and really helped me appreciate what the fed does.

<comment><USER30> > _Lords of Finance_

Oh, yes, great book! And good read.

Two things stuck in my mind:

A) How slow things were back then. The British finance minister ("Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of Her Majesty's Exchequer") would get on a steam ship, incognito, for a month or so to visit his counterpart in the US, then skipper back, and months later respond to the crisis.

B) How few people saw things coming. People thought the skirmishes that ended up precipitating WW I would soon be over, Irvin Fisher confidently declaimed just before the 1929 stock market crash that "stock prices have reached what appears to be a permanently high plateau", people didn't pay much attention to this obscure Adolf Hitler guy.

Every time, by the time the true dimensions became obvious, it was too late to do something (flee, sell, ...).

With respect to the current "15 cases going down to zero, we are doing great, we have it under control" flu, draw your own conclusions.

Edit: typos

<comment><USER40> Those stuck with me but so did the points the author made about gold. There was a depression. Central banks sticking to the gold standard is part of what made it the Great Depression.

<comment><USER30> Yes, absolutely. A return to the gold standard would be disastrous for our modern economies, in particular in times of exogenous shocks like now. The solution to bad central banks is not gold, but good central banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> While I haven't read the book, the corresponding multi-part documentary "The Ascent of Money" is a really good introduction to what money is and how it evolved over the past centuries. It's also free on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAbVltqySrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAbVltqySrA)

</comment><comment><USER42> This video by Ray Dalio, "How the Economic Machine Works in 30 Minutes" is an excellent primer on understanding the financial system as a whole: [https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0](https://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0)

</comment><comment><USER43> I really enjoyed the graphic novel "Economix: How our economy works (and doesn't work)" by Goodwin & Burr.

I found it informative, clear, concise, and funny at times, all uncommon for educational economic text in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER44> I started "Big Debt Crises" by Ray Dalio a while ago and so far it's proving to be a very good introduction on what you're looking for.

</comment><comment><USER45> 1.- First, understand that if we are playing head or tails, me having $10 and you having $1,000,000 , who will end up getting the other's money?

2.- Most independents money managers I know, love this book;

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds \- by Charles Mackay [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518)

</comment><comment><USER46> You can't go wrong with 'The Big Short'. I saw the film a few times before I ever bought the book, and it's still enlightening.

<comment><USER47> Michael Lewis has a habit of... let's say focusing on convenient facts to emphasize a narrative that doesn't usually match reality. His books are entertaining (I think I've read them all), but they are actually a pretty bad way to learn about how the markets work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Random Walk and Black Swan are two good reads. Even if you end up not agreeing with the two's takes, they'll make you sufficiently skeptical of how well a book claims to explain the industry, which is a good position to approach it from.

My bias will show, but the industry routinely blows itself on sometimes small or sometimes very large scales, sometimes or often through devices of its own creation. It's important to know that the system is entirely capable of doing this to itself, and therefore the system, and those in it, may not be able to explain itself well.

Edit: another thing worth reading is Too Big to Fail, The Big Short, and Greatest Trade Ever. All are engaging books, and really walk through how 2008 started and ended through different perspectives of the system. TBtF will cover the Fed and Tier 1. BS/GTE cover the sell side. And then when you pair GTE with what happened to it's focus, John Paulson, after 2008, in that he didn't really have a repeat 'win,' it's a good anecdote for what I said above.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a good start, "Money as debt". Saw it in university and since then you will never take financial markets seriously. And all the "stimulus" we see is just pushing the can forward. You will start to see through a lot of lies.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN- MKefA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA)

</comment><comment><USER50> Some more heterodox takes on economics/finance:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17836526-killing-the- hos...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17836526-killing-the-host)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42515482-and-forgive- the...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42515482-and-forgive-them-their- debts)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20655234-freakonomics- su...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20655234-freakonomics- superfreakonomics)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6304389-the-spirit- level](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6304389-the-spirit-level)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17368973-the-heretic- s-g...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17368973-the-heretic-s-guide-to- global-finance)

More conventional investment perspectives, particularly useful if you want to invest:

[https://www.goodreads.com/zh- TW/book/show/11645917-a-random-...](https://www.goodreads.com/zh- TW/book/show/11645917-a-random-walk-down-wall-street)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106835.The_Intelligent_I...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106835.The_Intelligent_Investor)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25574.Common_Stocks_and_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25574.Common_Stocks_and_Uncommon_Profits_and_Other_Writings)

</comment><comment><USER51> Actually - any college level book. There are tons, they're cheap on ebay, look for pearson or mcgraw hill. If you're creative, you can probably find a epub/pdf.

But even the DK Eye Witness have a good idea - how business works, how money works.

Financial system, economics, monetary policy become very simple with pictures, and even easier on an spreadsheet. Even more so is how many people don't know how much the government does in collecting statistics to analyze and examine the health of the economy - The BLS [https://www.bls.gov/](https://www.bls.gov/) is a great resource and once you have a basic understanding (or know healthy or "safe" numbers) you can explore other country economic numbers and see if they make sense (or not!) e.g. [https://psa.gov.ph/](https://psa.gov.ph/) for Philippine Statistics.

Contemporary Financial Management is great -

Accounting Princicpals are also great (can you read a PL sheet? Do you know GAAP? How about Compliance regulations?)

Just "money" is one piece of the puzzle - money is a tool and that tool has been transformed into different pieces that fit what we do finance in life -

A basic book would be rich dad, poor dad - it's quite cliche but it's a good introduction to "wealth" and assets vs liability == net worth.

\---

tl;dr I ranted, I can go on - the DK Eyewitness books are a good starting point and then you can dig deep - but mostly it really runs quite simple for most things and then gatekeeped by interesting vocabulary.

How Money Works: The Facts Visually Explained (How Things Work) Hardcover – March 14, 2017 by DK (Author) . How Business Works: A Graphic Guide to Business Success Hardcover – 2015 by Dk (Author)

The Economics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained Paperback – February 6, 2018

The Business Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained Paperback – November 20, 2018

How Business Works: The Facts Visually Explained (How Things Work) Hardcover – April 14, 2015

DK Eyewitness Books: Money: Discover the Fascinating Story of Money from Silver Ingots to Smart Cards Paperback – June 14, 2016

</comment><comment><USER52> I will offer that 'Where does money come from' By Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson. Its a fantastic short book on how money actually works in this system.

The follow up to this is Richard Werners study on central banking.

A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477)

This is one of the first empirical tests of theories of central banking and how money flows.

Anything by Richard Werner I think is lucid. He has lots of youtube videos that goes into the details in the book and this study.

</comment><comment><USER53> How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0)

I don't agree entirely but good signal-to-noise ratio on this content

<comment><USER54> "Ray Dalio says 'cash is trash' and advises investors hold a global, diversified portfolio" \- Jan 21 2020

Had you have listened to him, you would have just been taken out back, shot, and put in one of wuhans finest crematoriums… better off reading "Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails"[0]

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488)

<comment><USER9> His advise is still sound if you are an investor and not speculator.

The part of your investment that is in stock should be determined your investment horizon. If you don't need to sell your stock in next 15 years, don't hold cash.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, would have played out very well for those top ticking n225 in 1989, esp with every global CB's trying to follow in the footsteps of the BOJ, while everyone is crowding into "diversification" and searching for yield…

I consider investors to be the same as speculators, just speculators who think their beliefs will remain valid over long time frames… cause that's the gamble.

<comment><USER9> investor who does

\- dollar cost averaging,

\- diversification, small cost investing,

\- has sufficiently long time-horizon

has never lost money on 15 year timescale, at least past WWII.

<comment><USER54> Even assuming that's true, one can't say the sort of risk and investor took on 15 year look-backs since WWII has been evenly distributed to get some sort of acceptable return, nor can one say that this will continue hold true for the next 15 years. You may believe it hold true though, and many do… but very few will do their homework on the risks to their "diversification" and their own changing liquidity constraints that will occur over the "sufficiently long time-horizon"

<comment><USER9> > assuming that's true,

Don't assume. You can calculate it in spreadsheet.

> You may believe it hold true though,

In the long run we are all dead. We don't need to believe they hold true. Certainty is not part of this world. Because you never know is just rhetorical argument. Quantifying risk and going on that is good enough.

<comment><USER54> >Quantifying risk and going on that is good enough.

Because most people who are blindly buying indexes around the world thinking they are diversified and DCA are certainly doing that…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Elliott Wave Principle by Robert Prechter and A. J Frost

[https://epdf.pub/queue/elliott-wave-principle-key-to- market-...](https://epdf.pub/queue/elliott-wave-principle-key-to-market- behavior.html)

This is the technical analysis method used by many market traders and it both predicted this week's market plunge as well as described its form, and is currently forecasting a further plunge next week.

For economics I would look for any youtube talk by Prof. Steven Keen - <USER2> accounts for debt that most mainstream economists ignore.

<comment><USER56> Elliot Wave analysis is harmful, do not engage with it. I have friends that have lost a lot of money trying to follow it. It has 0 scientific background, it's not more than astrology applied to finance. Please don't spread these things, be responsible.

<comment><USER55> Do flocks of birds or schools of fish fly or swim in random directions? Or do they swarm together in discernible patterns? At core we share similar brain structures with them.

<comment><USER5> There's a gargantuan step to be made between saying "there are _some_ similarities between human and fish brains" to "the stock market behaves non- randomly like a school of fish". And an even bigger one to saying "The non- random patterns in the stock market can be divined with TA".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> "The End of Alchemy" by Mervyn King is a great book that explains fiscal/monetary policy and the modern banking system from the ground up. King was the head of the Bank of England during the last recession. This was the book that made me "get it".

"When Genius Failed" by Roger Lowenstein is the story of the fall of Long Term Capital Management which was basically the biggest hedge fund failure ever. Teaches you a lot about modern high finance and systemic risk.

</comment><comment><USER58> Besides books, read what Patio11 has written in the past. [0] [1] etc.

[0]: [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing- for-geeks)

[1]: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make- mone...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-money/)

</comment><comment><USER59> If you are looking for somebody who understands markets today - listen to Mike Green. He doesn't write, but sometimes speaks (Hidden Forces, RealVision)

</comment><comment><USER60> Reading Stress Test by Timothy Geithner taught me quite a bit, although it's not a primer on the financial system but play by play of the financial crisis.

</comment><comment><USER61> The Economist Guide to Financial Markets by Marc Levinson

</comment><comment><USER62> I have been here before where I actually wanted to find out what is going on with finance. I was amazed that its more about ideology than it was about finance itself. It was more about psychology and the intents of human nature than it was just about transactions and definitions.

In as much as books are good, i would urge you to follow certain men as well.

Prof. Richard Werner and all his books. Prof. Steve Keen and all his books.

List still loading ...

<comment><USER29> It's so true, I'd say over half of 'finance/trading' books are almost entirely about psychology and their own personal take, it's really discouraging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I've been having an interesting time working through Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd. It's ancient, but it really gets to the heart of what bonds and stocks _actually are_ , and gives you an insight into how everything worked before it all got accelerated to the Nth degree. The historical perspective of the 1928 crash being recent memory is really interesting too.

</comment><comment><USER64> I Worked as a quant for a few years, but in a certain point moved to data science and lost interest in stock market.

Read many technical and non technical books, and I recommend this one - <USER3> J Malchiel - A random walk down Wall-Street.

Simple but not simplistic, it has some great useful lifelong tips for investment. I follow it's advice for >10 years - from 2008 crisis, until these crazy days.

</comment><comment><USER65> If you have the time for a deep deep dive, I would recommend David Harvey's The Limits to Capital New Edition (2006). There's always the recorded version of his course on Reading Marx's Capital[1] which is similar.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/user/readingcapital](https://www.youtube.com/user/readingcapital)

</comment><comment><USER66> "How to Read the Financial Pages" is an excellent book.

It covers most of Equities and Bonds and is often hilarious.

It covers how governments finance themselves by issuing bonds, t-bills etc

A fairly straightforward read for any HNer, should be a couple of days easy.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0054ZBXLG](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0054ZBXLG)

</comment><comment><USER67> Money: The unauthorized biography by Felix Martin discusses money as social technology and its history [https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized- Biography-Coinage-...](https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography- Coinage-Cryptocurrencies/dp/0345803558)

</comment><comment><USER68> This is a fantastic book. Written for quant wannabes but really good for everyone. [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0071468293?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0071468293?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title)

</comment><comment><USER69> Oil 101 by Morgan Downey is one of the worst-edited books I've ever read, yet the amount of knowledge contained in that book is astonishing. The petroleum markets are vital to the financial system, as we saw on Monday when oil over- supply catalyzed a downward move in global equity markets.

</comment><comment><USER70> If you're interested in valuation, Damodaran's course is available for free online. Just google Damodaran.

</comment><comment><USER71> Specifically about the stock market, Flash Boys by Michael Lewis is a fun read and taught me a lot about what the stock market _is_. It's not the densest book. It's more of a narrative than a teaching tool, but for what it is I found it very informative.

</comment><comment><USER72> Stuff from Warren Buffet is usually good. You could browse the shareholder letters a bit [https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html](https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html)

</comment><comment><USER73> Check out the Wiley CFA Book suite, they are broad and explain concepts ranging from debt to economics ; [https://www.wiley.com/learn/cfashowcase/](https://www.wiley.com/learn/cfashowcase/)

</comment><comment><USER74> For understanding how money works, I'd recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.

</comment><comment><USER75> Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

[https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke- World/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke- World/dp/0143116800)

</comment><comment><USER76> [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13144133-where-does- mone...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13144133-where-does-money-come- from)

Where does Money come From

</comment><comment><USER77> Dr Ernest Chan

Ray Dalio

Marcos Lopez de Prado

These authors are how I started. I'd be happy to list specific books if that is helpful, but I don't want to give you a false sense that if you read books I mention you will have the same understanding that I do.

</comment><comment><USER78> Best books to understand why the financial system behaves the way it does are Nassim Taleb's books. Take the principles there, and apply them to finance and it explains 100% of why prices move the way they do.

</comment><comment><USER79> Since I'm mainly interested in risk and volatility, this list might be a bit biased but here we go:

A random walk down Wallstreet

Options and volatility pricing, by Natenberg

Why stock markets crash, by Didier sornette

Manias, panics and Crashes by Aliber and Kindleberger

Debt: the first 5000 years

<comment><USER80> I studied it, got the cfa designation, worked in the field.

Yet to see a better, more accurate or more succinct treatment than "A Random Walk Down Wall St" by Malkiel. Can't recommend it enough. Readable. Required knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Nick Nick Szabo's long essay: Shelling Out: The Origins of Money

[https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling- out/](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/)

</comment><comment><USER82> Stigum's Money Markets will tell you about the financial system specifically.

Something like The Economist's Guide to Financial Markets will give you a good general overview.

Some of the recommendations on here are truly awful.

</comment><comment><USER83> "Borrow: The American Way of Debt" by Louis Hyman

It's basically a historical study of debt in the United States over the past 100 years or so. Very interesting and educational.

</comment><comment><USER84> _Meltdown_ by Thomas E. Woods

 _The Great Deformation_ by David Stockman

 _The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank_ by Robert Wenzel

 _Economics in One Lesson_ by Henry Hazlitt

</comment><comment><USER85> I recommend a different approach. Start with a little bit of money in the stock market with a portfolio that you are allowed to change every Sunday. Then slowly understand what caused the value of your portfolio to go down or up and how you can hedge against your risks.(Once you lose or gain money you will get the motivation to read fat books dont worry) In the end its all a risk calculation and the faster you get into doing it the better. I am not rich or with a finance background but this is the approach I am following now.

</comment><comment><USER86> What is there to know?

Make massively risky bets on things that rarely break, but when they do they break so epically that the government will bail you out.

</comment><comment><USER87> At Finimize, we offer a selection of products designed to help with exactly this: [https://www.finimize.com/](https://www.finimize.com/)

Disclaimer: I work there!

Aside from that, I'd also recommend the previously mentioned Ray Dalio economic machine video, Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor (for understanding value investing) and Black Swan (for an alternative insight into tail risks such as the one we're going through)

</comment><comment><USER88> I wrote my Master's thesis on cryptocurrencies, and had to do some background research on how the monetary system works. I found that Bernard Lietaer's "Money and Sustainability - The Missing Link" was easily approachable and had a lot of good stuff in it. Another of my staples was David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" which has a lot of good and interesting content, but is very very heavy to read.

<comment><USER88> Also, this article by Bank of England is a very good introduction on how money is created in practice nowadays

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly- bulletin/2014/q1/m...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly- bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Any book on International Finance, to start. And then maybe a Banking 101 to understand how banking works. Then Macro Economics, to know how economics of markets and countries work.

There's no quick fix to learning this stuff.

However you might still want to; so take this biased Internet-clip with a grain of salt and enjoy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM)

<comment><USER30> There is no quick fix, indeed.

International finance is secondary to what the OP is requesting though. I think a history of banking, and the events that led to the current regulatory framework, would be suitable. Can't think of a good book though (except the _Bankers' New Clothes_ I recommended below).

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> The architect of the Euro, Bernard Lietaer, wrote a book called The Future of Money that I'm reading now.

</comment><comment><USER91> Where are the customers yachts? - but basically if you get the title you don't have to read it :)

</comment><comment><USER92> I recommend: 'The Origins of Economic Disorder' by Fred Block, and 'The Vega Factor' by Kent Moors.

<comment><USER92> I'll also add 'Financial Market Rates and Flows' by James C. Van Horne'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> reddit.com/r/mmt_economics

Not a book, I know but there are a lot of articles and resources in the sidebar, including a list of academic papers on the inner workings of money/monetary systems. Search for "MMT Foundations" within that subreddit to find those.

</comment><comment><USER94> Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

</comment><comment><USER23> Got to put in a plug for a book my mother read shortly before she died last year. The author is insanely smart, the book is really good, the message is incredibly important:

[https://marianamazzucato.com/publications/books/value-of- eve...](https://marianamazzucato.com/publications/books/value-of-everything/)

Blurb:

"Modern economies reward activities that extract value rather than create it. This must change to insure a capitalism that works for us all.

In this scathing indictment of our current global financial system, The Value of Everything rigorously scrutinizes the way in which economic value has been determined and reveals how the difference between value creation and value extraction has become increasingly blurry. Mariana Mazzucato argues that this blurriness allowed certain actors in the economy to portray themselves as value creators, while in reality they were just moving existing value around or, even worse, destroying it.

The book uses case studies–from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma–to show how the foggy notions of value create confusion between rents and profits, a difference that distorts the measurements of growth and GDP. "

</comment><comment><USER95> Marx's Capital, despite being old, is pretty prescient for the modern day.

</comment><comment><USER96> Unfortunately only in German language:

Bernard A. Lietaer: Das Geld der Zukunft

Bernard A. Lietaer: Mysterium Geld

</comment><comment><USER97> I'm not knowledgeable enough to properly recommend a book on the subject so take this with a grain of salt, but I thought the historical (and opinionated) overview of the evolution of English money in Christine Desan's "Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism" was interesting [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21492062-making- money](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21492062-making-money)

I like this quote about how financial institutions evolved:

"It happened improvisationally, indeed probably unintentionally. Participants solved one problem and created others; they reacted as often as they acted affirmatively; they moved by experience and intuition, without an overarching theory; and the whole affair took decades, involved many different actors, and coheres largely in retrospect."

</comment><comment><USER98> I think the best way to understand it all is to understand the history of how it came to be. I would start with something like:

Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

</comment><comment><USER99> "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman.

It's tough sledding, but worth it. And by giving the history, one comes to understand how we got to where we are.

"Capitalism" by Reisman gives a solid theoretical foundation on topics like rent control, inflation, etc. I especially found illuminating its coverage of the 1970's oil crisis and how the root cause of it was price controls.

I'd avoid economics books written by journalists and politicians, as all I've run across are dominated by ignorance, bias, and agendas. Ones by economists often have agendas, too, but they aren't nearly as ignorant. Just imagine a technical book about electronics written by a journalist, and you'll know what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER100> Highly recommend Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan.

</comment><comment><USER101> Youtube how economic machine works by ray dalio.

</comment><comment><USER102> I liked Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris

<comment><USER103> Seconding this. It's a fantastic book, a little outdated but easy to fill in the gaps.

I think the best route is to read this, skip all of the books marketed to retail traders. Read the things the professionals read like the CFA study materials.

Mark Meldrum also has a comprehensive coverage of the CFA body of knowledge on YouTube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Internship in a Wall Street Firm is better;

</comment><comment><USER105> House of Morgan - biography of JO Morgan and kin

Snowball - biography of Warren Buffet

The Good Earth - novel about Chinese farmer

Fortune's Children - the rise and fall of the Vanderbilts

<comment><USER30> These might be good books, but I doubt they'll answer OP's questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Web of Debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown.

</comment><comment><USER107> Corporate Finance - Stephen Ross

</comment><comment><USER108> I think the first question that you will face is if you agree with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and the random walk. Basically they say that prices reflect all available information and that you cannot "beat" the market (there's a subtle difference between EMH and random walk). The return on an investment is a direct reflection of the risk. Good reading to get an understanding for this are "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and papers by Eugene Fama (EMH will be covered by any intro to finance book as well). For a good overview of EMH, I like this paper: [http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/fileadmin/UCL- CS/images/Research_Stu...](http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/fileadmin/UCL- CS/images/Research_Student_Information/RN_11_04.pdf)

The investment takeaway is that you should invest in passive index funds with low management cost (typically ETFs).

There's different contrasting points of view most notably behavioral finance. The EMH argument is basically the market is an aggregation of all available information. Due to the power of averaging it is going to be correct (if one person overestimates, another will underestimate and it will all cancel out). The behavioral counterargument is that there are certain human biases that lead to all parties being wrong in the same direction (such as risk aversion). Another POV that is aligned with the behavioral view is that the theory of evolution provides a good framework for thinking about markets. I like the book "Adaptive Markets" which also gives a good overview of EMH and behavioral finance so I'll recommend that as a reference. I think together with "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" you're set for "general framework of thought" material.

Personally, I am a value investor so I can only recommend books from that school of thought. The basic idea is that you look at the fundamentals of a company and the stock market can misprice them. The holy grail is finding a company where the sum of (current) assets is worth more than the current market valuation via the stock price because in essence that means if the company would be liquidated and everything would be sold off, you'd still walk away with a profit. In essence, you're trying to buy 1$ for < 1$. This is Buffett's philosophy and he has done really well with it. I'd recommend "Value Investing" by Greenwald, Kahn, Sonkin and van Biema as a good intro book that summarizes everything and has some easy to follow examples (because you can't usually just take the assets face value but have to discount them etc.). The classics are "The Intelligent Investor" and "Security Analysis" (more academic but for me this is the gold standard). If you need a quick "how to read balance sheets/income statement/cash flow statements" I'd recommend "Warren Buffett Accounting Book"

I think the best essay that describes what markets are good for is "The use of Knowledge in Society" by Hayek. At least it makes sense for me that they serve the function of aggregating local and specialized information. If you're interested, it's also a decent idea to research the different theories of the business cycle. Keynesian, Real Business Cycle, Austrian etc.

tl;dr:

\- A Random Walk Down Wall Street

\- Adaptive Markets

\- Value Investing (+ Warren Buffett Accounting Book)

Edit: I'm assuming you want a "quick overview". Otherwise, get some mainstream Finance and Behavioral Finance textbooks :D

</comment><comment><USER109> 1\. People's QE (modern monetary policy, some great explain-to-me-like-I'm 5 sections) 2\. Doing Capitalism by Bill Janeway (innovation economy) 3\. Crashed by Adam Tooze (some financial history)

</comment><comment><USER110> I listened to the audiobook version of 3 books by Adam Tooze in the past year and found them to be excellent for understanding how finance works, through 3 separate case studies/examples if you will ..

1\. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order describes how most of the current global financial structures were formed, through the lens of WW1 policy

2\. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy .. moves you forward to WW2/post-depression economy

3\. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (recommended elsewhere in this thread) .. brings things up to current times

</comment><comment><USER111> Why there's no suggestions for Karl Marx? He predicted these crises and that they're unavoidable in capitalism and all only get worse with the time.

<comment><USER112> because we live in the real world and deal with real humans. Karl Marx never worked a single day in his life and created an ideology for people who believe in unicorns. His work is a criticism of Adam Smith's theories, not a self- sustainable solution.

<comment><USER111> He was the first person to prove that capitalism is not a self-sustainable solution either. Everything he said about capitalism was true and remains true. E.g. the current crisis could be predicted and it will be a super- crisis, because there're no new markets in the world. No more countries left to plunder. There's no way of solving the current crisis without starting a 3rd world war.

<comment><USER112> The capitalism that we have rn is actually a form of socialism :) I don't want to be that pessimistic about 3rd world war, a horrible solution to a big problem. I think humanity has a chance to have abundance, we need to be united and don't trust governments and banks and medical institutions, I can see that a lot of people are going through a healing phase of their mental state, they giving up all of the brainwashings and taking a red pill. Question is - <USER4> everybody use his chance on time? We will see. Peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> The short answer is this.

Wall Street exists to profit by skimming money off society, like a predator waiting for gazelle to approach a watering hole.

The Chinese government produced an excellent short film on this that was shown on airlines about 5 years ago. At the end was a warning to the USA not to devalue the dollar (to wipe out Chinese holdings.) :)

Silicon Valley VC's also do that, by skimming 2/20 (or more) from institutional investors with no downside risk to the VC.

The long answer - it will take you decades to study and learn. Do some reading and watch NBR.

</comment><comment><USER114> Why would you ever read a book on financial systems by someone who isn't absurdly rich

<comment><USER47> Why would you ever read a book on aeronautical engineering from someone who isn't a million miler?

<comment><USER114> Inappropriate metaphor

<comment><USER47> I know one of the people who literally wrote a chunk of the matching engine on one of the larger exchanges. He's not absurdly rich but a book from him on high performance order book management at scale would absolutely worth a read.

The metaphor is appropriate because quite frequently people who use things to the greatest effect know very little about the implementation or how it _actually works_.

<comment><USER114> That's a reasonable argument then, and now I appreciate the metaphor.

If one is interested in the technical details of implementation for technical reasons, I would agree that a brilliant and interesting engineer wouldn't necessarily be in line to profit from their value creation although would be available to discuss mechanics of implementation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exec launches professional cleaning service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/30/exec-cleaning/

<comment><USER2> I tried this and was really impressed. Removed the hassles of 1) finding a cleaner; 2) arranging a huge time window to be home (they text you when they are on their way); 3) guessing what cleaning products I need to provide; 4) guessing what language to speak.

I'm already familiar with what a cleaner is for so it was a small step for me to try this. Now that I'm in their system I'm much more likely to use Exec for things I've never considered hiring someone to do before.

</comment><comment><USER3> 65 an hour! Even with two people that seems a bit much. I have a woman I pay 30 dollars for an average of 3 hours of cleaning and she does such a good job I only have to have her over usually once every two weeks. She also does laundry, dishes, windows, sweeps and mops the floors, the whole shebang.

Still I like how Exec is looking at their customer base and adapting, that's how you stay relevant in an ever-evolving market!

<comment><USER4> Seriously, $65/hr is nuts. If that's the going rate for cleaning service in SF, I clearly picked the wrong profession. Even for two workers that's high. What are they doing, cleaning up hazmat? How can it be that their regular service functions at $25/person-hr, but cleaning is $32.50/person-hr?

I wonder if they have trouble finding trustworthy workers, or if they are intentionally targeting the the upper segment of the market. (Perhaps to drive sales for other Exec services?)

Is it possible they are providing benefits to their workers, and that explains the cost? It probably makes sense for someone who is around harsh chemicals all day to have decent healthcare.

<comment><USER5> If people actually pay taxes/ssi, $65/hour isn't that nuts any more.

Sure, you can go ahead and go the "no paperwork" route, that'll get the job done cheaper. But it's probably not a good plan for a web service.

<comment><USER4> How can they make their regular service work for $25/hour then?

<comment><USER6> Contractor vs. Employee would be one easy difference. Cleaning is a more specific task. I'm guessing they have a list of "do's and don't" for the 2 people @ $65 rate. If you have someone performing random "on demand" tasks paid after completion, they could easily just be 1099's. Profit could be similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found this end note interesting:

"Kan faces competition from the YC family itself. Another Y Combinator-backed startup Pathjoy is doing maid services for as little as $20 an hour."

Besides the fact that Pathjoy has terrible design (sorry, it's true) and is much cheaper, is there a big difference between the two?

<comment><USER8> Pathjoy seems to specialize in cleaning only. I really loved using them. The whole before, during, and after experience was seamless and great. The lady they sent over was extra sweet and stayed out of our way while she cleaned. She even left a note on her way out that really showed how much pride she took in her work and how hard she was willing to try to meet her own standards (which beat my standards of "clean" ;-) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is this a "startup" that needs VC funding? It looks like a cleaning company, just like the millions that are already out there. What am I missing? They have an app?

<comment><USER10> My question as well. Though I think you _can_ scale service businesses, they scale differently to product businesses. (E-myth revisited provides a roadmap).

But yes, cleaning is already a crowded market, and if someone could make the "Starbucks of cleaning companies", you'd think they'd have done it anyway. I guess Exec's bet is that they can leverage tech somehow to change the dynamics of the business, like Uber did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else on HN think this is a growing trend?

\- Services/Startups that start really wide and then begin to pivot by narrowing in scope/niche (ex. An exec for all things -> building an Uber for cleaning service)

<comment><USER12> I think that is simply a sign that the company is recognizing their markets better (hopefully).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand how this is different than the cleaning services that already exist in every major city. I use <http://www.accessmaids.com> here in Chicago. I can schedule online, pay with a CC, tell my doorman to let them in, and they send 2 people over for 1.5 hours for only $81 + tip.

Please tell me a service like this is novel in SF...

</comment><comment><USER14> Why are they employing anyone? This sounds like the perfect data service to provide to hook up people who have a cleaning job that needs to be done with people who are willing to do the job and enable them to agree on a price, with the data service taking a (small, no more than a finders fee) cut.

Include some ability for users to feedback on their experience with various cleaners, allow cleaners to feedback on users, provide some scheduling management tools for the cleaners, maybe take another small sliver for those services, etc. The goal being making it as easy as technologically possible both for someone to get their house cleaned and someone who wants to clean houses to find work. This is the model that will destroy all traditional employers, and doing so with great speed is important. There's not time to drag feet and try to drag along archaic structures like holding employees or being tied to employers any more.

<comment><USER15> Guaranteed performance would be my guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We've hired cleaners through agencies in the UK before.

The issue these and similar businesses will face, I expect, is that once the cleaners become established with a household, there is always a large temptation to "go direct" and cut the agency out of the loop. THis is a win/win for the cleaner and the household. Typically the agency markup is split 50/50, and the cleaner makes slightly more and the family pays sligtly less.

There also isn't an easy way for the agencies to enforce non-competes or anything either, I'd expect.

<comment><USER6> This may be another factor Exec discovered before rolling out an "official" cleaning service. The focus then is less on one off requests and more on getting return business and managing the customer. It would be easy enough for a contractor who got random work from Exec to pull a few regulars if there was no follow up after the web scheduled job. As a side note, I disagree with the win/win idea. Ethics and trust are put into question for me. If the service provider is willing to screw over their employer, what are they going to do in your home.

<comment><USER16> I don't know how Exec will run their business, but typically in the UK an agency will supply a cleaner for you, who is typically a housewife or similar with time on their hands and wants to earn some extra money. If you're happy with the cleaner they supply, they end up working regularly at your house, for months or years.

All this time, the agency is taking a % cut for providing the original cleaner. After that, the additional value they add is zero.

So yes, it may be unethical to disintermediate the agency, but by this time you have been working with the cleaner for weeks/months, so you get a fairly good idea as to what sort of person they are.

<comment><USER6> If you think of it as a placement agency, i.e. contractor, who works for you, then yes that extra % may seem like a problem. But then do you manage sick/vacation time? A company who manages the schedule would usually try to have a backup cleaner during those times or provide a new cleaner in the event the current one leaves. They might also follow up to maintain work standards. They might(should) provide insurance coverage on your belongings in case of an accident. On the cleaner side, finding "part-time" work is often a challenge and they enjoy the benefit of having the job handed to them and don't have to worry about where the next job is coming from.

It's interesting, there seems to be a few here on HN that have a problem with people building businesses and making money. Is it implausible that the cleaner you have had for months/years could end up with more work than they can handle and begin to bring in help to do the jobs they won? That's often how small businesses are created.

<comment><USER16> I have absolutely no problem at all with people starting a business and making money. Good for them.

I am just saying the flaws in the business model as I've experienced it. Agencies could add value via insurance, holiday cover etc, but the ones I've experienced never do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Allocate Memory (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://geocar.sdf1.org/alloc.html <comment><USER2> I don't like this article. It comes across as being written with the intent of highlighting the elevation the author's status as a 'low-level wizard', while conveying as little as possible to the ignorant reader. From the scattered aspects of memory management it covers to it uses of unexplained magic numbers in its code examples, it comes across more as an unsolicited secret handshake than cogent, empathetic attempt to elevate others in the practice.

Disclaimer: I had a hard time following this article. I'm also (ostensibly anyway) not the target audience. I was at one point the primary person responsible for the memory management in the JIT compiler[1] used by OpenJ9, though I haven't done that for a couple of years now.

[1] That is, the memory used by the JIT compiler itself, not its interactions with the garbage collector.

<comment><USER3> I am the target audience. I get exactly what he's going for but found a different gripe.

I really dislike his coding style! It's written to be "short" in favor of clear. I see what the code does, but not necessarily his intent.

      void*page_alloc(unsigned long long bytes) {
      void *x;
      for(;;) {
        x = mmap(0, bytes, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_ANONYMOUS|MAP_PRIVATE, -1, 0);
        if(x != MAP_FAILED) return x;
        out_of_memory();
      }

}

For embedded I stoped using "unsigned long long" in favor of uint64_t. He spends all those extra characters but can't put a space in the void pointer function definition?

<comment><USER4> Apologies! I usually typedef long long J;typedef unsigned long long U; and that makes it a bit shorter, but I wanted each example to compile, and not to get bogged down on typedefs.

<comment><USER5> If you use this kind of typedefs, most people reading your code will kind of hate you... either that or you're targeting the Internationl Obfuscated C Code Contents [1].

[1] - [https://www.ioccc.org/](https://www.ioccc.org/)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps this might help explain their reasoning: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010590)

<comment><USER3> I didn't downvote you, but your link contained this... and I considered it.

      ZI http(I d,I f,C*p,I r,I*sd){I i,o=0,b=0,s=0,w=0,g=0,e=0,c=0,cf=1,m=0;K q=0,a=ktn(11,0),v=ktn(0,0);
      for(i=b=0;i<r;++i){switch(p[i]){
      case'\n':if(!e)e=i;if(!q){q=kpn(p+w,g-w);if('\r'==(cf=p[i-1]))cf=p[i-2];}else if(!c){w=!!strchr("kK1",cf);if(!o)sc(d,0,sd);else if(w){if('g'==o)cwrite(f,OK("200","keep-alive")BLANK);else cwrite(f,OK("204","keep-alive")END204);}else{if('g'==o)cwrite(f,OK("200","close")BLANK);else cwrite(f,OK("204","close")END204);close(f);}a=k(o?-d:d,"dash",knk(2,q,xD(a,v),0),0,0);b=i+1;if(!o){if(!a){poop(f);R 0;}if(10!=a->t){r0(a);poop(f);R 0;}writer(f,kC(a),a->n);r0(a);if(!w)close(f);}if(b==r)R 1;q=0;o=0;a=ktn(11,0),v=ktn(0,0);}else{if((c-m)==10&& !strncasecmp(p+m,"connection",c-m))cf=p[s];js(&a,sn(p+m,c-m));jk(&v,kpn(p+s,e-s));}w=e=g=s=c=0;m=i+1;break;
      case' ':case'\t':case'\r':if(w&&!g)g=i;if(s==(e=i))++s;break;
      case':':if(!c)s=1+(c=i);break;
      case '/':if(!w)w=i+1;case '?':case '&':if(r>=(i+4)&&p[i+1]=='f'&&p[i+2]=='=')o=p[i+3];default: e=0;break;}}if(a)r0(a),r0(v);if(q)r0(q);R b;}

Thanks, I learned about something I absolutely hate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using sbrk(2) as an application stack seems like a bad idea. A lot of times that is where malloc gets its heap addresses from.

The article even says this but not strongly enough:

> It is worth mentioning that the C library malloc might be using and caching > the results of sbrk it may be unwise to mix this trick with your C library > malloc, but it is very useful in new programs that you have no intention of > using the C library malloc with.

No it is not a good idea to write "new programs" to apply hacky uses of sbrk(2) and conflict with malloc. Any use of sbrk(2) outside of a malloc implementation is pretty suspect as code smell. And you will be hard pressed to find any program or library that doesn't use malloc, short of embedded use cases.

<comment><USER8> Not only malloc, but the entire libc, as no functions in it explicitly guarantee that they do not call malloc and/or mess "your" brk range. You can guess it by what it does and ENOMEM in possible return status, but that is a stupid idea. sbrk is basically a remnant api and is now either an implementation detail of libc memory management or a fool's crutch [1].

[1] [https://opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-1272.250.1/emu...](https://opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-1272.250.1/emulated/brk.c.auto.html)

<comment><USER7> Yes. Notably stdio typically uses the heap. So I hope this author isn't planning to use printf for New Programs.

<comment><USER4> I don't, at least not when I care about performance.

stdio is a big unknown with highly variable performance across platforms and libc-versions.

<comment><USER9> Sure, yeah but it's not like using printf is a problem for error messages or logging. Using write() for that kind of stuff is more hassle than it's worth.

<comment><USER4> Oh it so is!

I can't count the number of times I've gotten 20-50x speed ups just turning off logging. Assuming printf is free (or even cheap) is the sort of thing that'll get you into trouble. It might not always matter, but when it does if your application is parsing strings at runtime at high volume, it's going to hurt!

I rarely log messages anyway, preferring to set state that I can then printout on command (e.g. siginfo)

<comment><USER10> So did you just turn logging off, or did you in fact write a better custom implementation? And how much faster did it go? Did you actually measure that? What kind of system was that on?

My first thought is, probably there was an fsync() or similar after logging each message. Also, printf() and friends have to lock the streams, so there might be some contention somewhere in case you're multi-threaded. That's not a problem that you can solve without some custom routing of logging messages.

Using printf, you can easily write dozens of megabytes of the most complicated formatting code on contemporary systems (I'm just pulling a number out of thin air here). More than any system should want to log.

<comment><USER4> People who deal in megabytes have different problems than people who deal in petabytes.

Usually just turn it off. At least at first. Note I'm talking diagnostic here; If I _need_ the log messages obviously I have to write a custom streaming system even if the system printf is fast enough because the API complicates recovery.

Printf can also vary in performance by 10msec or more based on the internal state. That's not good enough since my entire application has a hard limit of around 30msec. I can't even do one printf — even every N messages (for any N) because I'll never catch up.

<comment><USER10> > People who deal in megabytes have different problems than people who deal in > petabytes.

I just hope that this is not meant ad-hominem. At the very least it's a bad reply, unless you are dealing with petabytes _per second_. (Btw one of my current projects is a text editor that can handle gigabytes in memory; local operations take 5-50 microseconds. So I have reason to think I'm not entirely clueless).

> I rarely log messages anyway, preferring to set state that I can then > printout on command (e.g. siginfo)

That sounds much more reasonable to me giving the volumes that you cite, and why shouldn't we use printf() for that?

Why would printf "vary in performance by 10msec" or more, in ways that another application wouldn't? For how much data is that? How many printf() calls?

Anyway I shouldn't have gotten in the woods here. The blanket statement that printf() is slow and therefore an obscure API like sbrk() is a better use, is nonsensical for a guide that seemingly gives general advice for memory allocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > One major limitation of malloc (and even the best implementations like > jemalloc and dlmalloc) is that they try to use a single allocator for each > data structure.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it's good to note that malloc will switch between different paths based on the allocation size and what memory it has available to service the request.

<comment><USER4> malloc() has incomplete information. It doesn't know that this allocation of 0 bytes is soon going to balloon to a few GB in a future realloc(), so if it starts in brk, it'll mmap later and memcpy the data over. The good news is that the caller knows this.

By saying "I want a sizeof(Cons) object" versus "I want a buffer that's going to get big and used for a long time" versus "I want a buffer that'll get big but go away right after" means you get to avoid these unnecessary operations. That's important because they really add up when dealing with lots of data. That's how replacing a complicated and intelligent malloc() which has to rely on heuristics to decide which of the "different paths" to follow can lose big to a simpler strategy.

<comment><USER6> Why not just mmap at the start then?

<comment><USER4> Well then you're not using malloc() which is kindof my point.

Or are you asking something else?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone think of a use case for creating a second stack, without a thread, to allocate memory? The approach I have in mind: 1) Create a new stack POSIX makecontext() w/ initializer thread. 2) Initializer thread makes function calls to allocate objects. Functions are called in sequence and never return. The thread eventually reaches the end of its initialization sequence and stalls. 3) Use swapcontext() to return to the original thread from #1. 4) Original thread may reference all objects allocated on the stack of the other context.

This seems like a widget that could be used to accomplish something interesting, but I'm not sure what that might be.

<comment><USER4> A forth interpreter is probably the simplest and most-common example of a two- stack system someone might be familiar with.

Sometimes I'd like to push an event onto a queue from an interrupt (e.g. a signal handler) and the buffer size can balloon some; sbrk() might be used because it's faster than malloc() and I know the consumer is fast enough (even though it's currently busy).

Sometimes I know the memory usage is very temporary, but I don't want to contort my program to use alloca() and so again: using brk can be convenient.

There are other things that are stack-like that we don't often think of as stacks.

One interesting place might be an undo-stack: An editor typically has an undo and redo-button and will never be freeing this state anyway, so rather than malloc/realloc my state (and have extra copies going on), and without trashing my heap with a long linked list, I might prefer the performance of sbrk(). You could possibly use alloca() as well, but this would make redo very difficult.

Another might be in a consensus algorithm: If implementing raft you wanted to queue messages until you had a chance for your election, your "stack" might take several seconds before you can start processing it. Keeping this on the "other" stack would make it difficult to do any other processing (where's the event loop?), and using malloc/realloc() will introduce copies. Reserving sbrk() for this stage might make everything much more straightforward.

<comment><USER10> > One interesting place might be an undo-stack: [..] so rather than > malloc/realloc my state (and have extra copies going on), and without > trashing my heap with a long linked list, I might prefer the performance of > sbrk().

You can implement a stack-like thing that avoids copying, and even gives stable addresses, by linking fixed-size chunks (say 128 elements) in a list. A stack "pointer" is then a pointer to a chunk + offset.

That said, editor/undo redo items are not performance critical. And you will be hard pressed to find a reason why you need to optimize memory consumption. Assuming a memory overhead of 16 bytes per allocation and assuming that a human would make < 1M edits.

Preferring an obscure API like sbrk() instead is not good general advice. It's not portable and it precludes the use of basically any library including libc.

<comment><USER12> > And you will be hard pressed to find a reason why you need to optimize > memory consumption.

You might want to minimize fragmentation and number of underutilized heap pages.

Even if your allocator minimizes fragmentation by allocating similar size objects from same area, allocating a large number of objects risks some other code (possibly running in a different thread) allocating long-living objects in the same time.

This can cause pages to exist just to hold a single small object, preventing optimal use of memory.

In some algorithms, 90-99%+ of runtime can be in allocation and freeing small objects!

On top of that, accessing a sequential stack (array) is significantly faster. CPUs are built for that type of access patterns.

<comment><USER10> I had to read a little between the lines to understand your point, which I think is this: Even if you have an object type that requires only lowest- performance memory management (say, editor undo/redo items), you should separate these allocation concerns from all the other allocation concerns in the program, because you might risk contention. It's important to group allocations by lifetime.

To which I'll say, shouldn't we rather optimize and separate the high- bandwidth stuff, so we can keep using malloc-per-object for the unimportant stuff?

The rest of your comment does not apply to a simple undo/redo system:

> In some algorithms, 90-99%+ of runtime can be in allocation and freeing > small objects!

> On top of that, accessing a sequential stack (array) is significantly > faster. CPUs are built for that type of access patterns.

<comment><USER4> Not the person you're replying to, but:

> shouldn't we rather optimize and separate the high-bandwidth stuff, so we > can keep using malloc-per-object for the unimportant stuff?

If it helps, sure, but one problem that shows up nasty at high bandwidth is variable latency: malloc might be too clever and vary on the order of msec and with hard-real-time environments you can't amortise the cost over multiple messages since missing one means you never catch back up (without e.g. throwing data away)

<comment><USER2> I've only cursory exposure to it, but my understanding is that TLSF malloc[1] is designed to directly address those concerns. Is it known to be deficient such that its claims are invalid in / worthless for real-world use?

[1] [http://www.gii.upv.es/tlsf/files/ecrts04_tlsf.pdf](http://www.gii.upv.es/tlsf/files/ecrts04_tlsf.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Abstractions are leaky - much more often than one would like to think. On modern 64-bit systems, for example, with the apparently "limitless" virtual memory one has to pay close attention not only to the allocation patterns but also to the access patterns: random reads and writes from/to a huge array may lead to a significant drop in performance.</comment>


Ask HN: Which programming language should I learn for interviews? - <AUTHOR>

A bit of background:
- Picked up Java for my undergraduate degree, but stopped using it regularly 3 1/2 years ago
- Picked up Python in my last year of undergraduate, and stopped using it roughly 2 1/2 years ago
- Used PHP for a year in industry, and stopped using that 1 1/2 years ago
Since then I did a largely theoretical masters degree at the University of Cambridge, and got very little actual coding done except for a few side projects in functional programming languages.
In the last few weeks I've been interviewing regularly, but have found my programming skills to be very rusty, making the coding interviews very challenging.
My thought now is that I really need to spend 1-2 months completely immersing myself in a more mainstream language. Most companies seem to focus on Python, with a bit of Java and node.
Initially I though I should learn Python, both because it's popular, and also easy to write in an interview setting. However I am now thinking Java would be a better choice; it's used all over the place, and represents more of an "archetypal" OO language, and it will probably make asking questions about design patterns, SOLID principals etc. more straightforward.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Despite nemoniac's post, I think you're on the right track with Java. There's plenty of Java work out there, and modern Java is a better than average language to work with.

Given that you've done some functional programming, you might also want to investigate Scala. There's probably not too much Scala work out there right now, but you might be able to evangelize it for some appropriate workloads once you're doing Java development. It completely interoperates with Java (it runs on the JVM also). I think it's one of the best designed modern languages.

</comment><comment><USER3> Posted just the other day...

[https://plus.google.com/+ShriramKrishnamurthi/posts/fFNTWbQK...](https://plus.google.com/+ShriramKrishnamurthi/posts/fFNTWbQKHUp)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear this very often, but the difference with me is that I don't feel very confident in any language. I have a mediocre experience in 4 or 5, but I don't know any one language in serious depth.

You might argue that this doesn't matter, and it's the overall programming mindset that counts. The problem is that the interviewers tend to want me to write the answers to algorithmic problems in a real programming languages, and because I am out of practice, I spend too much time thinking about how to write the language, rather than the problem itself.

I should also add that in the interviews I've had, it's been quite common that interviewers ask quite advanced-knowledge questions about a specific programming language. E.g. I was recently asked by a very well-respected company to explain what a Future was in Java, and I had no idea.

Those are the reasons I think it would be good to really explore a single language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ruby and python is expensive.

<comment><AUTHOR> In what sense? Do you mean expensive to learn?</comment></comment>


Social network not social graph? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/09/21/howToAvoidSoundingLikeAnMo.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Winer makes a good point here. Don't let the technologists hijack a meaningful and understandable description with something that belongs in a CS lecture. Exclusion comes in many forms, one of them is language.

Keep it plain and simple in public.</comment>