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Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps
- dang 3y ago(This comment is just a stub so I can bundle a bunch of obsolete subthreads about a former typo in the URL)
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago404. 9 upvotes for the post currently, though, which I have a hard time seeing with a bad URL. Maybe they removed it when traffic spiked?
- mhh__ 3y agoI commented it elsewhere with the correct link (but it's good enough to deserve its own post so here it is but I posted the link on my phone so something got borked)
- politician 3y ago@mhh__ Link 404's.
- turtleyacht 3y ago404 The link had extra periods at the end. Edited, the page loads fine: http://www.jdawiseman.com/books/pricing-money/Pricing_Money_JDAWiseman.html http://www.jdawiseman.com/books/pricing-money/Pricing_Money_...
- mhh__ 3y agoThis link is right. Don't think I can edit the submission's URL (@dang ?) http://www.jdawiseman.com/books/pricing-money/Pricing_Money_JDAWiseman.html http://www.jdawiseman.com/books/pricing-money/Pricing_Money_...
- dang 3y agoFixed now. Thanks!
- hartator 3y agoWould love to be able to buy a printed copy.
- 0xcafefood 3y agoOn a related note: does anyone have good recommendations for printing services that can print and bind an online PDF, etc? I've looked into lulu.com and printme1.com but haven't used either for this purpose. I've wanted to do something similar for some of Beej's guides that are not in regular print, and would definitely consider for this too.
- SnooSux 3y agoI had a college course use Lulu to print the notes into a textbook. The quality was good for a paperback. I think you're limited to black and white though. The formatting of the TeX notes could have been better, but that's probably on the professor to have fixed.
- Nzen 3y agoI looked at lulu for printing Scott Alexander's Unsong. Their terms of service declaim [0] anyone looking to print content that they do not have copyright or a license for. That's the entire point of copyright. I recommend that you contact beej directly. [0] https://www.lulu.com/terms-and-conditions https://www.lulu.com/terms-and-conditions section 3 paragraph 3
- howard941 3y agoMost local printing places (places that do business cards, flyers, and the like) will gladly supply a quote for a single printed and bound PDF. Last time I did this only had to send the PDF for a complex flight sim. Shop local!
- Nzen 3y agoUm, the second paragraph has a link [0] to Wiley's page for it, which only offers a paperback edition. [0] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Pricing+Money:+A+Beginner's+Guide+to+Money,+Bonds,+Futures+and+Swaps-p-9780471487005 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Pricing+Money:+A+Beginner's+Guid...
- nodesocket 3y agoThis looks like an amazing resource. The problem I have is digesting all the information and financial/mathematical data. I tend to get overwhelmed by densely rich books and sort of tune out as I read.
- malux85 3y agoThen read slower
- tech_ken 3y agoThis is an excellent resource and a great read, but DAMN do money markets seem stupid as all get out to me. Where is the productive output of all these arbitrage shell games? How is this more than an abysmal waste of time and resources simply to make a small handful of bankers richer?
- novosel 3y agoGreat questions, but no reply will be coming at you. Except an apologetic nonsense-logic-it-is-obvious-it-works trope. Only product is the profit.
- scubbo 3y agoQuite. The general response I get from questions like this to financial folks is that these markets and vehicles and products are important "for liquidity", but they can never quite tell me who liquidity benefits other than the system itself.
- NoboruWataya 3y agoIt benefits people who need to raise cash, because they can do it more quickly and generally with lower financing costs than in an illiquid market. It benefits people who have cash that they want to invest, because they have more opportunities to do it and more visibility over which investments are safe and which ones are risky. Therefore it benefits society by transferring cash from people who have it now but need it later, to people who will have it later but need it now. Enabling and facilitating actual socially good activity, like manufacturing goods, providing services, etc. So there are definitely benefits to people outside the finance industry. However, in order to accept any of that you do ultimately need to believe, to some extent, in the market as a means of allocating resources. You don't need to think it's perfect, or that it shouldn't be regulated, or even that it is the fairest system, but you need to accept that it is the system we use. In a totally state-planned economy, finance wouldn't work or even make sense.
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- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing thread: Probability and Markets [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354259 - June 2023 (60 comments)
- gretch 3y agoI read a couple of pages and it looks good. I’m not a complete beginner but it’s still filling in some gaps in my knowledge. I appreciate the author’s work and giving it away for free. That said I feel like it’s skipping some explanation for what’s supposed to be a beginner’s guide. One thing that sticks out to me is that it jumps straight into talking about interest rates without explaining the time value of money and why interest exists. I wanted a book I could recommend and to others who knew even less than me, but I don’t think this could be it. (And maybe interest is covered later on, but the ordering is important)
- Breza 3y agoIt's not a book, but Advanced Investments from The Great Courses starts at the basics and gets into the weedy details of bond pricing, etc.
- Sherl 3y agoI am always amazed by Finance. But the engineer in me somehow always failed to grapple after few trenches deep into the realm of terminologies. I am strongly considering the MITx Finance specialization, but this resource is a great stop gap.
- tc313 3y agoIt’s hard to put a date on it, but surely it’s no more recent than (2021).
- dizzydes 3y agoI love it. That said, I’d love to see an updated version with QE as that has a gigantic effect in recent times. For simplicity it can be thought of as a proxy to interest rate adjustments but how it works is complex and can lead to strange side effects.
- zjmil 3y agoIf you want something related in video form, the lectures[0] from MIT 15.401 Finance Theory I [1] by professor Andrew Lo are great. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOsImI7FjCf6eDW https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63B2lDhyKOs... [1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-2008/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-401-finance-theory-i-fall-200...
- jrockway 3y agoThis is really interesting. Very early in my career I worked on a team that supported the interest rate swaps desk at a large investment bank. Not one person told me to read this book. I still don't know what they are. Wish I read this back then!
- nologic01 3y ago> some things have changed since it was written; it cannot be your risk manager this is a fair warning. the book does a better job than the usual pre-crisis interest rate literature discussing credit risk. a lot of the more advanced treatments were too self-absorbed in their made-up mathematical universe.
- marcrosoft 3y agoI love classic hypertext. I miss some of the old internet.
- arbitrary_code 3y agois there a version of this not presented in a timecube format?
- urthor 3y agoI deeply appreciate the green box. Thank you very much, look forward to the read.
- hotpockets 3y agoI am interested in this, but already confused on page 1. The book describes a bank needing to borrow swiss francs, but that doesn't make sense to me. Why not just borrow the money in their native currency? Does the book ever go into this?
- acover 3y agoIf you borrow in a different currency than your assets then you introduce currency risk. For example, if I make a loan of 100 CAD by borrowing 100 USD, then when the loan finishes I might only be able to convert 100 CAD to 50 USD.
- parpfish 3y agopricing money is easy. they usually print the price on both sides of the bill.
- 12907835202 3y agoThis looks great. One bit of feedback is that it seems quite difficult to read on a phone with small font requiring zooming and then horizontal scrolling. Both the website and the PDFs. Being so text heavy I imagine it should be fairly easy to add some CSS to make it more readable.
- ayolisup 3y agoToo bad it is not available in .epub format, I'd love to read it on my ereader.
- vacras 3y agoIf you download the html of the page, you can put it into Calibre and use Calibre's convert feature to generate an epub. I have not tried putting the generated file on my e-reader but it looks fine on desktop.
- bullen 3y agoThe price of bad money is war.
- henry2023 3y agoWorld government debt went from 5T at the beginning of the XXI century to about 305T today. Is this sustainable?
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoIsn't this the same discussion of infinite growth versus the ceiling of finite resources. It is logically not possible might take 20 years or 700 years but eventually a ceiling is reached.
- logicchains 3y agoGrowth doesn't require more resources. If your barber finds a way to cut your hair 10% faster, that shows up in GDP growth. Increasing efficiency leads to increased GDP.
- anhner 3y agoBut there is still a limit that will be reached. If a barber cuts your hair in 0 seconds, there is no more room to improve.
- aziaziazi 3y agoHow about industrie, craftsmanship and farming? Can they “grow” over a certain period of time while the required resources doesn’t?
- less_less 3y agoYes, of course. The quantity and quality of the output can certainly grow for a given resource input -- obviously with physical limits but we haven't generally reached those. It's possible to breed higher-yielding crops, design more efficient industrial processes, to craft with less waste, etc, and these have all been vastly improved over the past few centuries. The problem is that these industries have also been growing by increasing resource consumption along with output, to a level that isn't sustainable (even without more growth) beyond this century or so.
- alecco 3y agoAll these Financial guides are very interesting. But beware of falling into the illusion of being a good-enough active investor. It's like entering the Pro league as an overconfident amateur. The other players are the best in the universe. And they have cybernetic extensions: algorithmic trading with virtually limitless amounts of resources and information. And sometimes they have "alpha" you'll never, ever get your hands on. They prey on "dumb money" like naive/retail investors and pension/mutual funds. And at these times of high rates and inflation, the only safe move seems to be money market accounts and take the delta inflation hit. Try to focus your time in more valuable things like your friends and family. And keeping your sources of income.
- jdaw1 3y agoAgreed, strongly. Which is why the online edition has some “Cautionary words”: > Pricing Money is a beginner’s guide: it says so in big letters on the front cover. I believe it to be an excellent beginner’s guide — presumably many authors believe their own books to be excellent — but, being a beginner’s guide, it will not immediately make you a world-renowned expert. > It was written around the turn of the pedant’s millennium. In some parts it shows its age. It has been slightly freshened by the addition of green-boxed updates, but these have been written very concisely, more to point to developments than to explain them fully. > Please do learn from and be informed by Pricing Money. But also be cautious: it is not enough to make you a world-renowned expert; it does not list the many details that are both dull and necessary; some things have changed since it was written; it cannot be your risk manager.
- polymathemagics 3y agoAgree that people should not do active investing, although the solution would be passive investing (index funds), which allow you to focus on friends & family without missing out of the economy's long term gains.
- alecco 3y agoThis is a terrible moment for index funds.
- bbno4 3y agoThis is absolutely fantastic, it reminds me of Bits About Money[0] [0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/
- jpmoral 3y agoQuestion about the "Yields of Australian Commonwealth government bonds as of 21 January 2000" graph in Chapter 2 (page 13 of the A4 version): The y-axis (Yield in percent) values don't seem to match the data points. For example, the point for Feb '01 is labelled '7%' but the point is just above the 6% mark and well below the 6.5%. What am I not understanding?
- consultSKI 3y agoInteresting insights... it is going to take me a couple of reads to comprehend all the value here. Thx JDAW P.S. Thx for the PDF version
- AYBABTME 3y agoIs there an audiobook version of this?
- WFHRenaissance 3y agoI just want to say thank you to the author for writing this. It's very easy to read, and it's something I've sent to many close friends after reading.
- racked 3y agoWould gladly buy a physical copy of this book for $20-$30. Why on earth is it so expensive? ($92 on Amazon)
- svilen_dobrev 3y agoall these monie things seems to me like so much more evolved form of (horse race) betting.. essentialy playing with risk