Is there a good book that talks about all the type of products to invest?
There is no magical book that talks about the thousands of investment instrument types that are available ranging from brown fields land up to CDS futures and beyond. In addition to the huge number the depth of understanding ranges from knowing that a security type exists all the way up to being able to mark the instrument to market for illiquid instances of the instrument. I have been in the industry for about six years and have a fair understanding of what I would term the basics of most security types (I cannot, for example, mark to market exotic options) but most of my knowledge has come from using these instruments on a daily basis and Investopedia. The basis of my knowledge has come from the CFA Claritas Investment certificate book when I took that exam (and CFA Level 1 but I'd recommend against reading that unless you are taking the exam) and Paul Wilmott's texts on Quantitative finance; mostly Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance 2nd Edition. tl;dr: you can't get a good grounding on all security types ; there are far too many. To get a good grounding in the most used takes a lot of effort, much more than a book will give you.
"Whoa. These things are on two dimensions.  It's like burger and fries, you can also have chicken sandwich and fries, or burger and onion rings.   You can invest in an taxable brokerage account and/or an IRA.  And then, within each of those...  You can buy index funds and/or anything else. All 4 combinations are possible.  If someone says otherwise, take your money and run.  They are a shady financial ""advisor"" who is ripping you off by steering you only into products where they get a commission. Those products are more expensive because the commission comes out of your end.  Not to mention any names.  E.J.    If you want financial advice that is honest, find a financial advisor who you pay for his advice, and who doesn't sell products at all.  Or, just ask here.  But I would start by listening to Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, whomever you prefer.  And read John Bogle's book.   They can tell you all about the difference between money market, bonds, stocks, managed mutual funds (ripoff!) and index funds. IRA accounts, Roth IRA accounts and taxable accounts are all brokerage accounts.  Within them, you can buy any security you want, including index funds.  The difference is taxation.  Suppose you earn $1000 and choose to invest it however  Later you withdraw it and it has grown to $3000.  Investing in a taxable account, you pay normal income tax on the $1000. When you later withdraw the $3000, you pay a tax on $2000 of income.  If you invested more than a year, it is taxed at a much lower ""capital gains"" tax rate.  With a traditional IRA account, you pay zero taxes on the initial $1000.  Later, when you take the money out, you pay normal income tax on the full $3000.  If you withdrew it before age 59-1/2, you also pay a 10% penalty ($300).  With a Roth IRA account, you pay normal income tax on the $1000.  When you withdraw the $3000 later, you pay NOTHING in taxes.  Provided you followed the rules.   You can invest in almost anything inside these accounts: Money market funds. Terrible return.  You won't keep up with the market.  Bonds.  Low return but usually quite safe.  Individual stocks.  Good luck.   Managed mutual funds.  You're paying some genius stock picker to select high performing stocks. He has a huge staff of researchers and  good social connections.  He also charges you 1.5% per year overhead as an ""expense ratio"", which is a total loss to you.  The fact is, he can usually pick stocks better than a monkey throwing darts.  But he's not 1.5% better!  Index funds.  These just shrug and buy every stock on the market.  There's no huge staff or genius manager, just some intern making small adjustments every week.  As such, the expense ratio is extremely small, like 0.1%.    If any of these investments pay dividends, you must pay taxes on them when they're issued, if you're not in an IRA account.  This problem gets fixed in ETF's.  Index ETF's.  These are index funds packaged to behave like stocks.  Dividends increase your stock's value instead of being paid out to you, which simplifies your taxes.  If you buy index funds outside of an IRA, use these.  Too many other options to get into here." Founder makes available 100% equity, but uses a reasonable amount of the proceeds to pay him/herself a salary (or wage) and from that salary invests in the same initial offering to acquire shares for him/herself.   I see several problems.   What is a reasonable salary?   Also, this leaves the door open to the following scam:  Founders say that they are going to follow this plan.  However, instead of buying shares, they simply quit after being paid the salary.  They use knowledge gained from this business to start a competitor.  Investors are left holding an empty company.   Tax consequences.  The founder would pay income tax on the salary.  By contrast, if the founder instead sells shares, that would be capital gains tax, which is lower in many countries (e.g. the United States).   Why would I want to invest in a business where the founders don't believe in it enough to take a significant equity stake?   Consider the Amazon.com example.  Jeff Bezos makes a minimal salary, around $80,000 a year, less than many of his employees.  But he has a substantial ownership position.  If the company doesn't make money, he won't.  Would investors really value the stocks with a P/E of 232.10 in 2016 if they didn't trust him to make the right long term decisions?   It's also worth noting that most initial public offerings (IPOs) are not made when the founder is the only employee.  A single employee company instead looks for private investors, often called angel investors.  Companies generally don't go public until they are established in some way, often making money.  Negotiating with angel investors is different from negotiating with the public.  They can personally review the books and once invested tend to have input on how the money is spent.   In other words, this is mostly solving the wrong problem if you talk about IPOs.  This might make more sense with a crowdfunded venture, as that replaces a few angel investors with many individuals.  But most crowdfunded ventures tend to approach things from the opposite direction.  Instead of looking for investors, they look for customers.  If they offer a useful product, they will get customers.  If not, they never get the money.   Beyond all this, if a founder is only going to get a fair salary some of the time, then why put in any sweat equity?  This works fine if the company looks valuable after a year.  What if it doesn't?  The founder is out a year of sweat equity and has nothing in return.  That happens now too, but the possibility of the big return offsets it.  You're taking out the big return.   I don't think that this is good for either founders or investors.  The founder trades a potentially good or even great return for a mediocre return.  The investors trade a situation where both they and the founder benefit from a successful company to one where they benefit a lot more than the founder.  That's not good for either side. Diversification is a good method of risk management. Different types of investments do better in different situations and economic climates. Invest all your money at the wrong time in a single product and you could lose everything. You could also technically make a great deal of money, but actions such as these are the actions of speculators, not investors.  Spreading your investments appropriately lets you maximize your growth opportunities while limiting your risk. "I would refer you to this question and answers. Here in the US we have two basic types of life insurance: term and whole life.  Universal life is a marketing response to whole life being such a bad deal, and is whole life just not quite as bad. I am not familiar with the products in India, but given the acronym (ULIP), it is probably universal life, and as you describe is variable universal life.   Likely Description ""Under the hood"", or in effect, you are purchasing a term life policy and investing excess premiums in a collection of stock mutual funds.  This is a bad deal for a few reasons: A much better option is to buy ""level term insurance"" and invest on your own. You won't necessarily lose money, but you can make better financial decisions.  It is good to invest, it is good to have life.  A better decision would not to combine the two into a single product." Don't be ridiculous. You are competing with the best graduates out of the harvards in the world and you think reading a couple self help financial books will put you on level playing field? Don't waste your time with bcg or McKinsey. Thank you for that tip. I've not heard of that but will look into it. I am reading the Pumpkin Patch right now, and working in the Babson College program via Goldman Sach's 10,000 Small Business and it has me spinning on all the things to consider. Great learning experience thus far. Depends what you mean by business world and finance world.   NYTimes Sunday business section is a good start - mostly for large business.  The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias for how to invest your personal money - and you'll see why no one who says they can predict the market is accurate for very long.   INC Magazine for running a small company "Benninga's book(s) are pretty much the best crash course to financial modelling with Excel - be aware though, he has two distinct types of book. One is more of a walk-through of financial principles in Excel('Principles of Finance with Excel, 2nd Ed.'), and the other could better be described as a 'glossary' of financial applications in Excel(the oft-recommended 'Financial Modeling') . As far as I'm aware, both contain roughly the same volume of information about the same topics (could be some minor differences, as the walk-through-style book is newer), but are taught in somewhat different ways. It might be useful to obtain a copy of one or the other from a library and see if you enjoy the style of the book before purchasing it. I was fortunate enough to have a roommate where between us, we have both, but doing this individually is a 200+ dollar endeavor, and you will only be duplicating identical information. ;)  If you're interested in reading other interesting material, that may help you develop different perspectives/insight into investing, I would suggest, aside from reading the usual stuff (Intelligent Investor, Random Walk, etc), also obtaining a copy of Seth Klarman's ""Margin of Safety"". You'll have to do so in .pdf form, as the book is entirely out of print (and from what I've heard, Klarman himself bought out many retailers of all of their copies and had them destroyed), but it's an interesting read, that has a lot of modern relevance -  perhaps best evidenced by the fact that it's author, president of one of the largest hedge funds in the world, no longer wants it in print."