Help with Finance: Finding an Introductory Book

[Noxide]

I need help finding a solid introductory book on finance. I know nothing about finance other than its definition on wikipedia and I want to learn more. Can anyone recommend a solid text that starts from the most fundamental concepts and definitions and works its way up?

 

[fasterthanjoao]

What kind of textbook?

Are you a mathematician? A physicist? Something else?

What type of finance work are you interested in, and why? Are you preparing yourself for any sort of university course or is it just for your own background reading?

 

[AsianSensationK]

If it's just to get acclimated the textbooks used in intro finance courses may do. Fundamentals of corporate finance by Ross, Westerfield and Jordan was the book I used when taking the undergrad course from the Ross b-school at Michigan.

There are a couple of really interesting follow up type books that may be helpful. There's Fabozzi's Bond Markets, Analysis, and Strategies as well as Hull's Options, Futures, and other derivatives. Fabozzi's book is really interesting because he has a lot of discussion on mortgage backed securities in there.

These may or may not be enough to meet your needs. I doubt these are at really complicated levels because I know they're used at schools like Michigan and Michigan State in the undergraduate business curriculum.

 

[doodle_sack]

If you are looking for inspirations...these are the top ones:
1) How I became a Quant : Stories of 25 Top Quants
2) My life as a Quant, by Emmanual Derman
3) Working the Street by Erik Banks
4) Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
5) Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
6) The Complete Guide to Capital markets for Quantitative Professionals
7) Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber
8) Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society by Jeremy Bernstein

To know Financial Engineering as a subject, you can surf through these:
1) Martin Baxter & Andrew Rennie, Financial Calculus: An Introduction to Derivative Pricing
2) Jamil Baz and George Chacko, Financial Derivatives
3) Salih Neftci, Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives
4) Steven Shreve, Stochastic Calculus for Finance I, Stochastic Calculus for Finance II
5) Paul Wilmott, Derivatives: The Theory and Practice of Financial Engineering
6) Paul Wilmott, Wilmott's Quantitative Finance (three volumes)