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My goal was to cover some of the main fundamentals of finance to get a good all-round understanding along with eventually specializing towards practical applica
by abhimskywalker 11y ago
My goal was to cover some of the main fundamentals of finance to get a good all-round understanding along with eventually specializing towards practical application based finance... mostly stuff like designing & implementing algorithmic trading strategies, building securities exchanges/marketplaces on my own (maybe in python for now), maybe even design and implement more complex financial instruments & related contracts...
Was looking to get to learn both the theory and real-life implementations of this financial systems & processes. Hence wanted to start with Corporate Finance as it looked the most generic and seemed more like broad revision of stuff i already learned in a lot of econ classes and some management electives I took in college, with some additional knowledge to build good skeletal/context structure of the field and various agents involved, which I can later fill in with and place new concepts i would learn in the two other books.
Then next logical step seemed like getting to know ins and out of the financial instruments of more complex nature hence Hull seemed good to start with. (Also the fact that I read first few chapters in college and quite liked them then...)
And then Security Analysis seemed like a good way to look at all of the above learnt info in more analytical way specifically from POV of an investor.
Also as suggested in the other comment "Trading and Exchanges" by Harris is definitely going on this list of books to finish for me to get better practical implementation understanding.
As of now quant side of finance seems most interesting, but again haven't explored all other roles/areas fully so can't say for sure as yet where would I like to work.
A finance nOOB question... is there something like a full-stack finance engineer? Closest seems to be a quant guy...
- akg_67 11y agoIf your objective is to be quant, I will suggest removing Corporate Finance and Security Analysis books from your reading list. "Trading and Exchanges" is a good addition. A learning strategy that has served me well is to look at syllabus and recommended texts for an academic program closely aligned to my interest. Going through recommended texts in these programs on my own has helped me gain more structured knowledge on the topic of interest. Each successive module builds on previous modules. In your case, you want to check out academic programs related to financial engineering and computational finance such as at Baruch, Carnegie-Mellon, UW etc. Here is a link to UW Computational Finance and Risk Management curriculum: http://depts.washington.edu/compfin/content/ms-degree/curriculum http://depts.washington.edu/compfin/content/ms-degree/curric.... The link to course description shows the recommended textbooks. Going through these books will prepare your well to be a Quant. In case you want to see recommended readings from other programs, check out list of financial engineering program at https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/ https://www.quantnet.com/mfe-programs-rankings/. I am sure some of them have detailed syllabus and recommended readings available on Interest. A few other resources for recommended readings: Quant net Forum Book section https://www.quantnet.com/forum/books.37/ https://www.quantnet.com/forum/books.37/ Quant net Master Reading List https://www.quantnet.com/threads/master-reading-list-for-quants-mfe-financial-engineering-students.535/ https://www.quantnet.com/threads/master-reading-list-for-qua...
- abhimskywalker 11y agoThanks for the references! The idea to follow the texts and readings from one of these courses seem to be a good idea. Will read up on that.