How to Learn About Finance

Lots of people ask me for good beginner books about finance.
That’s one of the hardest questions I get.
I think back to when I was learning about finance – one of my Coast Guard shipmates had these things called ‘mutual funds,’ so I found some free literature about mutual funds and started reading.
At the time, I was living in an economically unfortunate town in coastal Washington State. There was a used bookstore in town. I bought two books: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel, and Bogle on Mutual Funds, by John Bogle. The first two books I read were books on indexing!
After reading them, I knew with every cell in my body that the Efficient Market Hypothesis was wrong, and had to be disproved.
But those books were a good start. So sometimes when people ask me what books they should start with, I tell them about Malkiel and Bogle. Then I tell them that those books are all wrong. They look at me like I have a cabbage for a head.

This post was published at Mauldin Economics on JULY 27, 2017.