Good books for learning about tax strategy/planning
Keep in mind that chasing after tax savings tends to not be a good way of saving money.  What is a good strategy? Making sure that you take all the deductions you are entitled to. What is a bad strategy: You asked for a book recommendation. The problem is that I don't know of any books that cover all these topics. Also keep in mind that all books, blogs, articles, and yes answers to questions have a bias. Sometimes the bias can be ignored, other times it can't. Just keep looking for information on this site, and ask good specific questions about these topics. "J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax is, remarkably, a great read. It's a line by line review of the tax forms, and offers commentary and examples for every scenario. Of course, it's updated every year to reflect new rules and numbers.  I actually read it from cover to cover the first year I started working.  It's not going to offer convoluted strategies to use, but, you'll understand your tax return well enough to respond to the advice you encounter elsewhere.  To mhoran's point - ""Don't let the tax tail wag the investing dog.""  Taxes are important, but should take a back step to earning and investing. Those who didn't sell at the height of the dotcon bubble ""to avoid the big tax bill"" only saw in hindsight that paying taxes is part of success not failure."
What is a good resource to learn about options trading strategies? Options are a quite advanced investment form, and you'd do well to learn a lot about them before attempting to dive into this fairly illiquid market. Yale's online course in financial markets covers the Options Market and is a good starting point to make sure you've got all the basics. You may be familiar with most of it, but it's a decent refresher on lingo and Black-Scholes. How can I use options to establish some cash flow from long standing investments while minimizing capital gains expenses? This question seems designed to get people to talk about covered calls. Essentially, you sell call contracts: you let people buy things you already have at a price in the future, at their whim. They pay you for this option, though usually not much if the options aren't in the money. You can think of this as trading any return above the call option for a bit of extra cash.  I don't invest with taxable accounts, but there are significant tax consequences for options. Because they expire, there will be turnover in your portfolio, and up front income when you take the sell side. So if you trade in options with close expiration dates, you'll probably end up with a lot of short-term capital gains, which are treated as normal income. One strategy is to trade in broad-based stock index options, which have favorable tax treatments. Some people have abused this though to disguise normal income as capital gains, so it could go away. Obviously the easy approach is to just use a tax advantaged account for options trading. An ETF might also be able to handle the turnover on your behalf, for example VIX is a series of options on S&P500 options. A second strategy I've heard of is buying calls and puts at a given strike price. For example, if you bought Dec '13 calls and puts on SPX @ 115 today, it would cost you about $35 dollars. If the price moves more than 35 dollars away from 115 by DEC '13 (in either direction), you've made a profit. If you reflect on that for a bit, you'll see why VIX is considered a volatility index. I guess I should mention that shorting a stock and buying a put option at the market price are very similar, with the exception that your loss is limited to the price of the option.  Is there ever an instance where options investing is not speculative? The term 'speculative' is not well defined. For many people, the answer is no. It's very easy to just buy put options and wait for prices to fall, or call options and wait for prices to rise. Moreover, the second strategy above essentially gives you similar performance to a stock without paying full price. These all fall under the headline of increasing a risk portfolio rather than decreasing it, which I figure is a decent definition of speculation. On the other hand, there are ways to use options minimize risk rather than increase it. You can buy underwater options as portfolio insurance, if your portfolio drops below a certain amount, you still have the right to sell it at a higher one. And the Case-Schiller index is run in part, on the hopes that one day there might be a thriving market for real estate options (or futures). When you buy a home or lend money to someone to buy one, you could buy regional Case-Schiller options to protect you if the regional market tanks. But in all of these cases, it's required for someone else to take the opposite trade. Risk isn't reduced, it's traded around. So technically, there is a speculative element to these as well. I think the proper question here is whether speculation is present, but whether speculation can be put to good ends. Without speculators, the already very thin market for options would shrivel faster. That is a loaded question but I'll give it a shot.  First things first you need to determine if you are ready to invest in stocks.  If you have a lot of high interest debt you would be much better served paying that off before investing in stocks.  Stocks return around 8%-10% in the long run, so you'd be better off paying off any debt you have that is higher than 8%-10%. Most people get their start investing in stocks through mutual funds in their 401k or a Roth IRA.  If you want to invest in individual stocks instead of mutual funds then you will need to do a lot of reading and learning. You will need a brokerage account or if you have a stock in mind they might have a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP) that you could invest in directly with the company. You will have to compare the different brokerage firms to determine which is best for you.  Since you seem to be internet savvy, I suggest you use a discount brokerage that let's you buy stocks online with cheaper commissions.  A good rule of thumb is to keep commissions below 1% of the amount invested. Once you have your online brokerage account open with money in there the process of actually buying the stock is fairly straightforward.  Just place an order for the amount of shares you want.  That order can be a market order which means the purchase will occur at the current market price.  Or you can use a limit order where you control at what price your purchase will occur. There are lots of good books out there for beginners.  Personally I learned from the Motley Fool. And last but not least is to have fun with it.  Learn as much as you can and welcome to the club. Coincidentally just read a nice post on this topic: http://thefinancebuff.com/no-tax-advantage-in-rsu.html In short, sell the stock as soon as it vests and treat it as a cash bonus. Assuming you're in the US and the stock is possible to sell (public company, no trading window restrictions, you have no material nonpublic information, etc.)  What do you do with a cash bonus? If you have no savings, an emergency fund would be good, then start on retirement savings perhaps... it sounds a bit like you could use some broad general financial planning info, my favorite book for that is: http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Simple-Financial-Strategies-People/dp/B0013L2ED6 One exception to selling immediately could be if the company stock is hugely undervalued, but it probably isn't, and it's probably too hard to determine. Assuming you were immersed in math with your CS degree, the book **'A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street' by Andrew Lo** is a very interesting book about the random walk hypothesis and it's application to financial markets and how efficient markets might not necessarily imply complete randomness.    Lots of higher level concepts in the book but it's an interesting topic if you are trying to branch out into the quant world.  The book isn't very specific towards algorithmic trading but it's good for concept and ideas.  Especially for general finance, that will give you a good run down about markets and the way we tackle modern finance.    **A Random Walk Down Wall Street** (which the book above is named after) by **Burton Malkiel** is also supposed to be a good read and many have suggested reading it before the one I listed above, but there really isn't a need to do so.    For investing specifically, many mention **'The Intelligent Investor' by Benjamin Graham** who is the role model for the infamous Warren Buffet.  It's an older book and really dry and I think kind of out dated but mostly still relevant.  It's more specifically about individual trading rather than markets as a whole or general markets.  It sounds like you want to learn more about markets and finance rather than simply trading or buying stocks.  So I'd stick to the Andrew Lo book first.    ---  Also, since you might not know, it would be a good idea to understand the capital asset pricing model, free cash flow models, and maybe some dividend discount models, the last of which isn't so much relevant but good foundations for your finance knowledge.  They are models using various financial concepts (TVM is almost used in every case) and utilizing them in various ways to model certain concepts.  You'd most likely be immersed in many of these topics by reading a math-oriented Finance book.  Try to stay away from those penny stock trading books, I don't think I need to tell a math major (who is probably much smarter than I am) that you don't need to be engaging in penny stocks, but do your DD and come to a conclusion yourself if you'd like.  I'm not sure what career path you're trying to go down (personal trading, quant firm analyst, regular analyst, etc etc) but it sounds like you have the credentials to be doing quant trading.    ---  Check out www.quantopian.com.  It's a website with a python engine that has all the necessary libraries installed into the website which means you don't have to go through the trouble yourself (and yes, it is fucking trouble--you need a very outdated OS to run one of the libraries).  It has a lot of resources to get into algorithmic trading and you can begin coding immediately.  You'd need to learn a little bit of python to get into this but most of it will be using matplotlib, pandas, or some other library and its own personal syntax. Learning about alpha factors and the Pipeline API is also moderately difficult to get down but entirely possible within a short amount of dedicated time.     Also, if you want to get into algorithmic trading, check out Sentdex on youtube.  He's a python programmer who does a lot of videos on this very topic and has his own tool on quantopian called 'Sentiment Analyzer' (or something like that) which basically quantifies sentiment around any given security using web scrapers to scrape various news and media outlets.  Crazy cool stuff being developed over there and if you're good, you can even be partnered with investors at quantopian and share in profits.    You can also deploy your algorithms through the website onto various trading platforms such as Robinhood and another broker and run your algorithms yourself.    Lots of cool stuff being developed in the finance sector right now.  Modern corporate finance and investment knowledge is built on quite old theorems and insights so expect a lot of things to change in today's world.  ---  With a math degree, finance should be like algebra I back in the day.  You just gotta get familiar with all of the different rules and ideas and concepts.  There isn't that much difficult math until you begin getting into higher level finance and theory, which mostly deals with statistics anyways like covariance and regression and other statistic-related concepts.  Any other math is simple arithmetic. "i'm absolutely a newcomer in economics and i wish to understand how things work around finance. This is a pretty loaded question. To understand finance, you need the basics of economics. In almost every economics school in the country, you first study microeconomics and then economics. So, we'll start with micro. One of, if not the, most popular books is ""Principles of Microeconomics"" by Mankiw. This book covers the fundamentals of micro econ (opportunity, supply, demand, consumer choice, production, costs, basic game theory, and allocation of resources) in a clear and effective manner. It's designed for the novice and very easy to read.   Like Mankiw's other book, ""Principles of Macroeconomics"" is also top notch. There is some overlap in key areas (i.e. opportunity cost, supply, demand, indifference curves, elasticity, taxation) because they are fundamental to economics and the overlap will always be there, but from there the book goes into key macro concepts like GDP, CPI, Employment, Monetary and Fiscal policy, and Inflation. An excellent intro primer indeed.   Now that you have the fundamentals down, it's time to learn about finance. The best resource, in my opinion, is ""Financial Markets"" by Robert Shiller on Open Yale Courses. I've personally taken Prof. Shiller's class last semester, and the man is brilliant. The lectures cover every single aspect of finance and can turn the complete novice into a fairly experienced finance student. The first lecture also covers all the math required so you don't get lost at any point. Be warned, however, that the course is very deep. We used Fabozzi's textbook ""Foundations of Financial Markets and Institutions,"" which is over 600 pages deep and we were required to know essentially all of it. Watch the videos and follow the readings and you'll be a finance whiz soon! Financial Markets on Open Yale  And that's your roadmap to what you want. There are other economics books and it's true that the first few chapters of both Mankiw books are largely the same, but that's because any economics course always covers the basics first. If you want to look at other books, Krugman has written some good books as well. Be sure to read reviews because some books are meant for 2nd/3rd year econ students, so you don't want to get a too advanced book. At the novice level, we're interested in understanding the basic concepts so we can master Fabozzi. As for finance books - Fabozzi teaches you all the fundamentals of financial markets so you've got a powerful foundation. From there you can expand to more niche books such as books on investing or on monetary policy or whatever you want. Best of luck!" https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/most-important-finance-books-2017-1  Bloomberg, finacial times, chat with traders, calculated risk, reuters, wsj, cnbc(sucks), bnn (if canadian)  Audio books on youtube helped me read a lot of finance books in a short amount of time, listen while working out.  One thing that helped me stand out at my student terms (4th year here) was learning outside of the classroom and joining an investment club. Learning programming can help if thats a strength, but its really not needed and  it can waste time if yoi wont reach a point to build tools.  Other than that at 18 you have more direction than i did, good luck! As a follow-up, I ended up buying:    * Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity (Pignataro, Paul; Hardcover)     * Mergers, Acquisitions, Divestitures, and Other Restructurings, + Website (Pignataro, Paul; Hardcover)     * The Essential CFO: A Corporate Finance Playbook (Nolop, Bruce P.; Paperback) First of all, make sure you have all your credit cards paid in full -the compounding interests on those can zero out returns on any of your private investments. Fundamentally, there are 2 major parts of personal finance: optimizing the savings output (see frugal blogs for getting costs down, and entrepreneur sites for upping revenues), and matching investment vehicles to your particular taste of risk/reward. For the later, Fool's 13 steps to invest provides a sound foundation, by explaining the basics of stocks, indexes, long-holding strategy, etc.   A full list Financial instruments can be found on Wikipedia; however, you will find most of these to be irrelevant to your goals listed above. For a more detailed guide to long-term strategies on portfolio composition, I'd recommend A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing. One of the most handy charts can be found in the second half of this book, which basically outlines for a given age a recommended asset allocation for wealth creation. Good luck!