Social Sciences
Capital allocation under uncertainty — the field where a good mental model compounds and a bad one is expensive.
14 fields · 153 topics · 174 curated works
How firms raise and deploy capital.
Foundations & Overviews · Capital Structure · Cost of Capital · Capital Budgeting · Discounted Cash Flow
The frameworks for deciding what to own.
Foundations & Overviews · Modern Portfolio Theory · Efficient Market Hypothesis · Capital Asset Pricing Model · Factor Investing
Deciding what something is worth, as distinct from what it costs.
Foundations & Overviews · Intrinsic Value · Relative Valuation & Multiples · Free Cash Flow Analysis · Terminal Value
Ownership stakes and the markets that price them.
Foundations & Overviews · Stock Market Mechanics · Fundamental Analysis · Technical Analysis & Its Critics · Value Investing
Lending, and the pricing of the promise to repay.
Foundations & Overviews · Bond Pricing · Yield Curves · Duration & Convexity · Credit Risk
Contracts whose value depends on something else.
Foundations & Overviews · Forwards & Futures · Options Basics · Black-Scholes Model · The Greeks
Mathematical modelling of markets.
Foundations & Overviews · Stochastic Calculus in Finance · Ito's Lemma · Monte Carlo Pricing · Risk-Neutral Valuation
The discipline of surviving the tail.
Foundations & Overviews · Value at Risk · Stress Testing · Tail Risk & Fat Tails · Liquidity Risk
Financing companies before they are legible to public markets.
Foundations & Overviews · Venture Capital Model · Power Law Returns · Startup Fundraising · Term Sheets
The plumbing of the financial system.
Foundations & Overviews · Commercial Banking · Investment Banking · Fractional Reserve Banking · Bank Balance Sheets
Reading what a company actually reports.
Foundations & Overviews · Balance Sheet · Income Statement · Cash Flow Statement · Accrual Accounting
The pattern that keeps repeating with new instruments.
Foundations & Overviews · Tulip Mania · South Sea Bubble · The 1929 Crash · The 1987 Crash
The applied version, which most people need more than the theory.
Foundations & Overviews · Budgeting & Saving · Compound Interest · Retirement Planning · Tax-Efficient Investing
A new asset class with an unusually high ratio of noise to substance.
Foundations & Overviews · Blockchain Fundamentals · Bitcoin · Ethereum & Smart Contracts · Consensus Mechanisms
No prior grounding assumed.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay · 1841
The founding popular account of speculative mania, covering tulips and the South Sea and Mississippi schemes — hugely influential and substantially…
+17 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto · 2008
Nine pages solving double-spending without a trusted third party by making history expensive to rewrite.
+41 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Theory of Interest
Irving Fisher · 1930
Derives interest rates from the interaction of time preference and investment opportunity, arguing the rate of interest is not a monetary phenomenon…
+113 more at this level
12 of 174 works
Charles Mackay
The founding popular account of speculative mania, covering tulips and the South Sea and Mississippi schemes — hugely influential and substantially unreliable, since later archival work found the tulip episode far smaller and narrower than Mackay describes.
about 19 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin Lefèvre
A fictionalised account of trader Jesse Livermore arguing that reading the tape and the patience to sit through a correct position matter more than any specific system, and that the same emotional mistakes ruin traders across every era.
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Walks through, step by step, how one new bank deposit expands into a multiple of new deposits across the banking system as each bank relends a fraction of what it receives, making commercial bank money creation mechanical rather than mysterious.
Warren E. Buffett
Argues that the concentrated outperformance of several unrelated Graham-and-Dodd-trained investors is not survivorship-biased luck but evidence that buying below intrinsic value works.
William F. Sharpe
Argues from simple accounting identities alone, before any empirical evidence, that the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar by the amount of its extra costs, because the two together make up the whole market.
link checked 17 Sept 2026The Options Clearing Corporation
Sets out, contract by contract, what an options buyer or writer is actually exposed to, arguing the asymmetric payoff of options makes them behave nothing like the underlying stock they reference.
Franklin R. Edwards
Traces how a fund run by Nobel laureates and star traders lost nearly all its capital in weeks, arguing the scale of LTCM's leverage, not any single bad trade, is what turned an ordinary bad quarter into a near-systemic event.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gregor Andrade, Mark Mitchell & Erik Stafford
Surveys merger activity across the 1973-1998 waves and finds acquisitions create modest combined value on average but that the gains accrue overwhelmingly to target shareholders, with acquirers roughly breaking even.
link checked 17 Sept 2026U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Walks a first-time reader through the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement and statement of shareholders' equity as the four documents every public company must file, explaining what each answers and how the three others tie back to the balance sheet.
Mr. Money Mustache (Peter Adeney)
Argues that the number of years to financial independence is set almost entirely by savings rate, not income, because a higher savings rate simultaneously shrinks required spending and grows the portfolio.
Paul Graham
Fundraising should be run as a fast, parallel process that manufactures scarcity and momentum, because a slow sequential pitch to investors one at a time gives each one room to say no.
link checked 17 Sept 2026U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Division of Trading and Markets
Surveys the empirical evidence on where and how US stock trades actually occur, arguing that competition among fragmented venues has kept trading costs low without harming price discovery.