
Ask HN: Introductory Finance for Hackers - sensiblesasha
Are there any good resources that go over the basics of finance&#x2F;what goes on inside big financial institutions? I&#x27;m curious and couldn&#x27;t find a good intro.
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o_nate
Some book recommendations here:

[http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/cji/890-11/Goldman-Sachs-
Sug...](http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/cji/890-11/Goldman-Sachs-Suggested-
Reading-List.pdf)

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

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

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

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

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

[https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/](https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/)

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

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11thEarlOfMar
I'm neither a writer nor a finance pro, but I've been investing for myself for
about 30 years. I wrote these posts for my kids so they could learn from my
mistakes as well as what I learned along the way.

[https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-
fi...](https://hackernoon.com/https-medium-com-davisjames-hacker-finances-
introduction-14b8283e8677)

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PaulHoule
See

[https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market-
Microstructu...](https://www.amazon.com/Trading-Exchanges-Market-
Microstructure-Practitioners/dp/0195144708/)

for the securities side of the industry and

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470095008/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470095008/)

for banks that take deposits and make loans.

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

