They're reasonably straightforward concepts in themselves (I originally learnt shorting from the wiki page), but I struggled to make the jump to get a feel for

They're reasonably straightforward concepts in themselves (I originally learnt shorting from the wiki page), but I struggled to make the jump to get a feel for them, to be able to build thoughts using them, rather than look on as an outsider. What Heinlein calls "to grok". Here's a puzzle in the spirit of building the series of logical gates by combining NAND gates. You could learn enough about the concepts using wikipedia. Consider a scenario: the government bans short-selling. Your task: find a way you could synthesise a short using just forwards. What are some practical considerations that might make it less practical to do this than pre-ban shorting? I find that when I understand how something emerged, I have a good feel for it. A lot of these concepts go back a long way - stock practices that developed through trading stock of the dutch east india company. For this reason, I'd recommend Niall Ferguson, _The Ascent of Money_. Das _Traders, Guns and Money_ is a good read. I couldn't follow all of it when I read it, but found it to be good for feel. There's a late 20th century writer John Kenneth Galbraith who wrote some good histories. I like _the end of uncertainty_ but it's hard to get. He wrote others that will be fine. It would probably be useful to read a book about Drexel Burnham Lambert, and how Milken developed their junk bond trades. I don't know of one, perhaps someone else can recommend. For broader economic picture stuff, I recommend Hazlitt _Economics in One Lesson_; Schiff _How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes_; Soros, _The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means_.