Books, Videos, Tutorials to learn about different investment options in the financial domain
Those are some very broad questions and I don't think I can answer them completely, but I will add what I can. Barron's Finance and Investment Handbook is the best reference book I have found. It provides a basic description/definition for every type of investment available. It covers stocks, preferred stocks, various forms of bonds as well as mortgage pools and other exotic instruments. It has a comprehensive dictionary of finance terms as well. I would definitely recommend getting it.  The question about how people invest today is a huge one. There are people who simply put a monthly amount into a mutual fund and simply do that until retirement on one side and professional day traders who move in and out of stocks or commodities on a daily basis on the other. Just by chance I recently encountered this link - Do It Yourself MFE, which describes an attempt to self-educate to the level of Master of Financial Engineering. It lists books, online courses, etc. which I think may be interesting for you too. Investopedia does have tutorials about investments in different asset classes. Have you read them ? If you had heard of CFA, you can read their material if you can get hold of it or register for CFA. Their material is quite extensive and primarily designed for newbies.  This  is one helluva book and advice coming from persons who have showed and proved their tricks. And the good part is loads of advice in one single volume. And what they would suggest is probably opposite of what you would be doing in a hedge fund. And you can always trust google to fish out resources at the click of a button.
There's a few different types of investments you could do. As poolie mentioned, you could split your money between the Vanguard All World ex-US and Vanguard Total Stock Market index. A similar approach would be to invest in the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF. You wouldn't have to track separate fund performances, at the downside of not being able to allocate differential amounts to the US and non-US markets (Vanguard will allocate them by market cap). You could consider investing in country-specific broad market indices like the S&P 500 and FTSE 100. While not as diversified as the world indices, they are more correlated with the country's economic outlook. Other common investing paradigms are investing in companies which have historically paid out high dividends and companies that are under-valued by the market but have good prospects for future growth. This gets in the domain of value investing, which an entire field by itself. Like Andrew mentioned, investing in a mutual fund is hassle-free. However, mutual fees/commissions and taxes can be higher (somewhere in the range 1%-5%) than index funds/ETF expense ratios (typically <0.50%), so they would have to outperform the market by a bit to break-even. There are quite a few good books out there to read up about investing. I'd recommend The Intelligent Investor and Millionaire Teacher to understand the basics of long-term investing, but of course, there are many other equally good books too. A couple of good books I enjoyed and found very understandable (regarding the stock market): As for investment information you can get lost for days in Investopedia.  Start in the stock section and click around. The tutorials here (free) give a good introduction to different financial topics. Regarding theoretical knowledge: start with what you know well, like your career or your other interests.  You'll get a running start that way. Beyond that, it depends on what area of finance you want to start with.  If it's your personal finances, I and a lot of other bloggers write about it all the time.  Any of the bloggers on my blogroll (see my profile for the link) will give you a good perspective.  If you want to go head first into planning your financial life, take a look at Brett Wilder's The Quiet Millionaire.  It's very involved and thorough. And, of course, ask questions here. It depends on whether you want a career as a fund manager/ analyst or if you want to be an investor/ trader. A fund manager will have many constraints that a private investor doesn’t have, as they are managing other people’s money.  If they do invest their own money as well they usually would invest it differently from how they invest the fund's money. Many would just get someone else to invest their money for them, just as a surgeon would get another surgeon to operate on a family member. My suggestion to you is to find a job you like doing and build up your savings. Whilst you are building up your savings read some books. You said you don’t know much about the financial markets, then learn about them. Get yourself a working knowledge about both fundamental and technical analysis. Work out which method of analysis (if not both) suits you best and you would like to know more about. As you read you will get a better idea if you prefer to be a long term investor or a short term trader or somewhere in-between or a combination of various methods. Now you will start to get an idea of what type of books and areas of analysis you would like to concentrate on. Once you have a better idea of what you would like to do and have gained some knowledge, then you can develop your investment/trading plan and start paper trading. Once you are happy with you plan and your paper trading you can start trading with a small account balance (not more than $10,000 and preferably under $5,000). No matter how well you did with paper trading you will always do worse with real money at first due to your emotions being in it now. So always start off small. If you want to become good at something it takes time and a lot of hard work. You can’t go from knowing nothing to making a million dollars per year without putting in the hard yards first. "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!" No need for Fabozzi yet. His stuff gets cover in plenty of college textbooks, old and new.   Keep browsing /r/finance, /r/personalfinance, and /r/investing and you'll find the usual recommendations.  Here's goldman sach's recommended reading list: http://www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/cji/890-11/Goldman-Sachs-Suggested-Reading-List.pdf  No need to read it all. Follow your interests. "not sure if I will help or just spread more gibberish but maybe the first concept I'd look at is risk tolerance.  Risk tolerance is discerning your ability to risk losing money to get better results.  So you know the saying ""the higher the risk the higher the reward""?  The way most people are going to operate is somewhere on the midpoint of behavior - not doing the riskiest thing, but not doing the very most cautious thing either.  So given that concept, some investments will be more appealing given different economic scenarios.  Typically stocks are going to reward your investment a little more aggressively than a treasury bond if the economy is humming along.  This drives prices of treasuries lower, stock yields higher.  In a crappy economy, people want to move their money into conservative investments like a treasury bond. Bond prices rise while stock prices dip.    If you google 'correlations between the market prices of stocks and the market prices of Treasury bonds' you will find plenty of helpful and hopefully not too convoluted articles a la http://finance.zacks.com/correlation-treasuries-stocks-10871.html Don't get freaked out by graphs, the graphs are just a way to put into a picture that correlation." 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! "As foundational material, read ""The Intelligent Investor"" by Benjamin Graham.  It will help prepare you to digest and critically evaluate other investing advice as you form your strategy."