Comment by kriro

I think the first question that you will face is if you agree with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and the random walk. Basically they say that prices reflect all available information and that you cannot "beat" the market (there's a subtle difference between EMH and random walk). The return on an investment is a direct reflection of the risk. Good reading to get an understanding for this are "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and papers by Eugene Fama (EMH will be covered by any intro to finance book as well). For a good overview of EMH, I like this paper: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/fileadmin/UCL-CS/images/Research_Stu...

The investment takeaway is that you should invest in passive index funds with low management cost (typically ETFs).

There's different contrasting points of view most notably behavioral finance. The EMH argument is basically the market is an aggregation of all available information. Due to the power of averaging it is going to be correct (if one person overestimates, another will underestimate and it will all cancel out). The behavioral counterargument is that there are certain human biases that lead to all parties being wrong in the same direction (such as risk aversion). Another POV that is aligned with the behavioral view is that the theory of evolution provides a good framework for thinking about markets. I like the book "Adaptive Markets" which also gives a good overview of EMH and behavioral finance so I'll recommend that as a reference. I think together with "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" you're set for "general framework of thought" material.

Personally, I am a value investor so I can only recommend books from that school of thought. The basic idea is that you look at the fundamentals of a company and the stock market can misprice them. The holy grail is finding a company where the sum of (current) assets is worth more than the current market valuation via the stock price because in essence that means if the company would be liquidated and everything would be sold off, you'd still walk away with a profit. In essence, you're trying to buy 1$ for < 1$. This is Buffett's philosophy and he has done really well with it. I'd recommend "Value Investing" by Greenwald, Kahn, Sonkin and van Biema as a good intro book that summarizes everything and has some easy to follow examples (because you can't usually just take the assets face value but have to discount them etc.). The classics are "The Intelligent Investor" and "Security Analysis" (more academic but for me this is the gold standard). If you need a quick "how to read balance sheets/income statement/cash flow statements" I'd recommend "Warren Buffett Accounting Book"

I think the best essay that describes what markets are good for is "The use of Knowledge in Society" by Hayek. At least it makes sense for me that they serve the function of aggregating local and specialized information. If you're interested, it's also a decent idea to research the different theories of the business cycle. Keynesian, Real Business Cycle, Austrian etc.

tl;dr:

- A Random Walk Down Wall Street

- Adaptive Markets

- Value Investing (+ Warren Buffett Accounting Book)

Edit: I'm assuming you want a "quick overview". Otherwise, get some mainstream Finance and Behavioral Finance textbooks :D