Solid reading/literature for investment/retirement/income taxes?
For the mechanices/terms of stock investing, I recommend Learn to Earn by Peter Lynch. I also like The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle. It explains why indexing is the best choice for most people. For stock picking, a good intro is The Little Book of Value Investing by Chris Brown. And then there is The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. IMO, this is the bible of investing. "You bring up some very high level stuff, each of which can be the subject of a life's work.  For taxes, I first read J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax. I actually read it cover to cover instead of using it as a reference guide. I hit topics that I'd otherwise have never looked up on purpose. Once you familiarize yourself with the current tax code, keeping up on changes to the code goes pretty well.  As far as investing goes, William Bernstein has two titles, “The Four Pillars of Investing” and “The Intelligent Asset Allocator”. Others have liked “Personal Finance for Dummies” by Eric Tyson. These are great introductory books, the classic is “Security Analysis” by Graham & Dodd. Warren Buffet was a student of Benjamin Graham and he did fine applying these principals.  For retirement, The Number by Lee Eisenberg was a good read. I consider retirement an extension of the investing education, only the money flow is reversed, withdrawals, no new deposits. Of course this is an oversimplification.  In my own reading list, I include books such as “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds” by Charles MacKay and “The Great Crash 1929″ by John Kenneth Galbraith. Understanding how these bubbles happen is critical to a complete education. I'm convinced that when it comes to investing if I can teach my daughter to understand the concept of Risk and Reward and to understand there are certain common alerts to such bubbles, the simplest of which is the term ""this time is different"" as though a hundred years of market dynamics can change in a matter of a few years.  Last, there are books like ""Stop Acting Rich"" by Dr Thomas Stanley. Not quite investing, per se, but a good read to get an idea of how we have a distorted view of certain signs of wealth.  Keep reading, no harm in taking books out of the library and returning if the first chapter or two disappoints." Something that introduces the vocabulary and treats the reader like an intelligent individual? It's a bit overkill for 'retirement', but Yale has a free online course in Financial Markets. It's very light on math, but does a good job establishing jargon and its history. It covers most of the things you'd buy or sell in financial markets, and is presented by Nobel Prize winner Robert Schiller. This particular series was filmed in 2007, so it also offers a good historical perspective of the start of the subprime collapse. There's a number of high profile guest speakers as well. I would encourage you to think critically about their speeches though. If you research what's happened to them after that lecture, it's quite entertaining: one IPO'd a 'private equity' firm that underperformed the market as a whole, another hedge fund manager bought an airline with a partner firm that was arrested for running a ponzi scheme six months later.  The reading list in the syllabus make a pretty good introduction to the field, but keep in mind they're for institutional investors not your 401(k).
It's important to have both long term goals and milestones along the way. In an article I wrote about saving 15% of one's income, I offered the following table:  This table shows savings starting at age 20 (young, I know, so shift 2 years out) and ending at 60 with 18-1/2 year's of income saved due to investment returns. The 18-1/2 results in 74% of one's income replaced at retirement if we follow the 4% rule. One can adjust this number, assuming Social Security will replace 30%, and that spending will go down in retirement, you might need to save less than this shows. What's important is that as a starting point, it shows 2X income saved by age 30. Perhaps 1X is more reasonable. You are at just over .5X and proposing to spend nearly half of that on a single purchase.  Financial independence means to somehow create an income you can live on without the need to work. There are many ways to do it, but it usually starts with a high saving rate. Your numbers suggest a good income now, but maybe this is only recently, else you'd have over $200K in the bank.  I suggest you read all you can about investments and the types of retirement accounts, including 401(k) (if you have that available to you), IRA, and Roth IRA. The details you offer don't allow me to get much more specific than this. You're misunderstanding the concept of retirement savings. IRA distributions are taxed, in their entirety, as ordinary income. If you withdraw before the retirement age, additional 10% penalty is added. Investment income has preferential treatment - long term capital gains and qualified dividends are taxed at lower rates than ordinary income. However, IRA contributions are tax deductible. I.e.: you don't pay taxes on the amounts contributed to the IRA when you earned the money, only when you withdraw. In the mean time, the money is growing, tax free, based on your investments. Anything inside the IRA is tax free, including dividends, distributions (from funds to your IRA, not from IRA to you), capital gains, etc. This is very powerful, when taking into account the compounding effect of reinvesting your dividends/sale proceeds without taking a chunk out for taxes. Consider you make an investment in a fund that appreciated 100% in half a year. You cash out to reinvest in something less volatile to lock the gains. In a regular account - you pay taxes when you sell, based on your brackets. In the IRA you reinvest all of your sale proceeds. That would be ~25-35% more of the gains to reinvest and continue working for you! However, if you decide to withdraw - you pay ordinary rate taxes on the whole amount. If you would invest in a single fund for 30 years in a regular account - you'd pay 20% capital gains tax (on the appreciation, not the dividends). In the IRA, if you invest in the same fund for the same period - you'll pay your ordinary income rates. However, the benefit of reinvesting dividends tax-free softens the blow somewhat, but that's much harder to quantify. Bottom line: if you want to plan for retirement - plan for retirment. Otherwise - IRA is not an investment vehicle. Also consider Roth IRA/conversions. Roth IRA has the benefit of tax free distributions at retirement. If your current tax bracket is at 20%, for example, contributing $5K to Roth IRA instead of a traditional will cost you $1K of taxes now, but will save you all the taxes during the retirement (for the distributions from the Roth IRA). It may be very much worth your while, especially if you can contribute directly to Roth IRA (there are some income limitations and phaseouts). You can withdraw contributions (but not earnings) from Roth IRA - something you cannot do with a traditional IRA. Both types of plans offer a tax benefit.  A traditional IRA allows you to invest pre-tax money into the account and it grows tax free. Once you withdraw the money it then gets taxed as though it were income based on the amount you withdraw for that calendar year. A Roth IRA has you invest post-tax money and also grows tax free. However, when you make withdraws in retirement that money is then tax free.  Neither plan is right for everybody. If you have a very high income now and plan on being in a smaller tax bracket later when you'll be making withdraws then the traditional IRA is better. If you will be in a higher bracket later, then the Roth IRA will serve you more. Depending on the way you manage your retirement investing you can likely invest in both if you are unsure as to which would be better. The same type of investments should be able to be nested within each type. "It depends on what you're talking about. If this is for your retirement accounts, like IRAs, then ABSOLUTELY NOT! In your retirement accounts you should be broadly diversified - not just between stocks, but also other markets like bonds. Target retirement funds and solid conservative or moderate allocation funds are the best 'quick-and-dirty' recommendation for those accounts. Since it's for the long haul, you want to be managing risk, not chasing returns. Returns will happen over the 40 or so years they have to grow.  Now, if you're talking about a taxable stock account, and you've gotten past PF questions like ""am I saving enough for retirement"", and ""have I paid off my debt"", then the question becomes a little more murky.  First, yes, you should be diversified. The bulk of how a stock's movement will be in keeping with how its sector moves; so even a really great stock can get creamed if its sector is going down. Diversification between several sectors will help balance that.  However, you will have some advantage in this sector. Knowing which products are good, which products everybody in the industry is excited about, is a huge advantage over other investors. It'll help you pick the ones that go up more when the sector goes up, and down less when the sector goes down. That, over time and investments, really adds up. Just remember that a good company and a good stock investment are not the same thing. A great company can have a sky-high valuation -- and if you buy it at that price, you can sit there and watch your investment sink even as the company is growing and doing great things. Have patience, know which companies are good and which are bad, and wait for the price to come to you.  One final note: it also depends on what spot you are in. If you're a young guy looking looking to invest his first few thousand in the market, then go for it. On the other hand, if you're older, and we're talking about a couple hundred grand you've got saved up, then it's a whole different ball of wax. It that spot, you're back to managing risk, and need to build a solid portfolio, at a measured pace." You're asking for a LOT. I mean, entire lives and volumes upon volumes of information is out there.  I'd recommend Benjamin Graham for finance concepts (might be a little bit dry...), *A Random Walk Down Wall Street,* by Burton Malkiel and *A Concise Guide to Macro Economics* by David Moss. So what you’re saying is that the undergrad level text (fundamentals of blablabla) is good enough to get a decent understanding of the concepts?  I’m a bit confused of the two bcs for e.g. take Hull, the grad level book is more widely recommended. I’ll graduate very soon, enter the workforce, and plan to go to a grad school several years down the line. Now, being in a sort of break point, I’m not sure which one I should go for. I do have an exposure to read some finance texts, but not a lot—introductory chapters here &amp; there—and would prefer texts that are not super dry.  What do you think? A quick update for people finding this thread through Google. With the help of a few awesome Bogleheads, I compiled all the relevant research done into two Wiki articles: This includes comparing US to Irish domiciled ETFs, how to calculate tax withholding leakage and estate tax concerns. Hope you find this useful. Many good sources on YouTube that you can find easily once you know what to look for.  Start following the stock market, present value / future value, annuities &amp; perpetuities, bonds, financial ratios, balance sheets and P&amp;L statements, ROI, ROA, ROE, cash flows, net present value and IRR, forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation (heavy on stats but useful in finance), the list goes on.  If you can find a cheap textbook, it'll help with the concepts.  Investopedia is sometimes useful in learning concepts but not really on application.  Khan Academy is a good YouTube channel.  The Intelligent Investor is a good foundational book for investing.  There are several good case studies on Harvard Business Review to practice with.  I've found that case studies are most helpful in learning how to apply concept and think outside the box.  Discover how you can apply it to aspects of your everyday life.  Finance is a great profession to pursue.  Good luck on your studies!