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Economics

Youtube – How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

One of the best resources, along with Dalio’s book Principals for Navigating Big Debt Crisis, to help you understand how the economy functions on a larger scale. This video and book are better than any economics course I took in High School and College because they focus on what actually happens in the markets from a transactional perspective, and not from a theoretical, supply/demand curve perspective.

Economics 101 — “How the Economic Machine Works.”

Created by Ray Dalio this simple but not simplistic and easy to follow 30 minute, animated video answers the question, “How does the economy really work?” Based on Dalio’s practical template for understanding the economy, which he developed over the course of his career, the video breaks down economic concepts like credit, deficits and interest rates, allowing viewers to learn the basic driving forces behind the economy, how economic policies work and why economic cycles occur.

Book – Principals for Navigating Big Debt Crisis by Ray Dalio

Crucial for anyone looking to understand macroeconomics and to understand how the market works as one piece.

The template comes in three parts provided in three books: 1) The Archetypal Big Debt Cycle (which explains the template), 2) 3 Detailed Cases (which examines in depth the 2008 financial crisis, the 1930’s Great Depression, and the 1920’s inflationary depression of Germany’s Weimar Republic), and 3) Compendium of 48 Cases (which is a compendium of charts and brief descriptions of the worst debt crises of the last 100 years). Whether you’re an investor, a policy maker, or are simply interested, the unconventional perspective of one of the few people who navigated the crises successfully, Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises will help you understand the economy and markets in revealing new ways.

Investing

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book showed me how important it is to manage risk when investing and trading options. Nassim Taleb provides a unique insight into investing based off his years as an option trader in the pit.

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Programming

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron

This book was one of the most useful books to me when I was learning more advanced programming concepts such as machine learning and deep learning. I used the first version of this book, and I know the second version is just as good with minor updates.

It is an absolute must that you use the resources made available by Géron on GitHub to learn this material. One of the most effective ways to learn programming for me was to input the code, tear it apart, understand why it was there, then try to recreate it myself.

Through a series of recent breakthroughs, deep learning has boosted the entire field of machine learning. Now, even programmers who know close to nothing about this technology can use simple, efficient tools to implement programs capable of learning from data. This practical book shows you how.

By using concrete examples, minimal theory, and two production-ready Python frameworks—Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow—author Aurélien Géron helps you gain an intuitive understanding of the concepts and tools for building intelligent systems. You’ll learn a range of techniques, starting with simple linear regression and progressing to deep neural networks. With exercises in each chapter to help you apply what you’ve learned, all you need is programming experience to get started.