Ask HN: Hackers Guide to the Stockmarket?

I recently picked up:

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Proven Way to Beat the "Pros" and Take Control of Your Financial Future by Daniel Solin. A good basic starter book and very short.

For a larger (and timely) economic view, I also slogged through This Time is Different by Reinhart and Rogoff. This book kind of looks at macro-economic conditions around recessions in history to abstract out a pattern around recessions, currency collapses, and depressions. It is not about the stockmarket in a very specific way.

Neither of these sources are particularly hacker-centric viewpoints of the market. Are you looking for algorithmic trading stuff? You might want to check out http://quant.ly/

Frankly, the best way to learn about the stock market is to buy and sell a few stocks. This is the fastest way to gain the greatest amount of knowledge. If you can't afford it, do it on a 'play' account. Give yourself a budget of x dollars and y days. Try to make the most amount of money (or, if you are on a dummy account, try to lose as much money as possible).

Khan Academy has a bunch of things on markets which I think is pretty digestible for people - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKly7Y1woJs

Etrade has a bunch of videos on the stock market lingo but I think you need an account.

I'd start out with Investopedia (http://www.investopedia.com/university). That will give you a good overview and teach you the key terms which often make other investing books confusing.

This is definitely worth 15 minutes of your time. http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money

tl;dr if you don't know where to start, start with an index fund.

I have the same feeling. I am also interested to get bit deeper knowledge of stock market. I find that the books written by financial experts can be a bit though read for someone not used to all the financial terminology.

You could try a virtual stock exchange game - http://vse.marketwatch.com/Game/Homepage.aspx

Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor