Broadly speaking, finance is mainly composed of two contents. As corporate finance at the entity level, at this level, as a financial officer of a company, you should know how to finance the company, whether it is equity or creditor's rights. This is called capital structure. How to make a decision to invest in a project within a company, from the improvement of equipment to the acquisition of other companies, all use discounted cash flow method (DCF, discounted cash flow, of course, there are other methods, but this is the most important one in academia); There are also dividend policies and other content. The most famous course in this category is corporate finance. This course is considered to have studied finance. In foreign countries, it is often divided into two semesters, but in China, learning is complicated and fast, and the courses are important, easy to learn and difficult to master, and the pressure is still relatively great. In addition, your decision is based on your understanding of the company's financial situation, so in order to understand the company's financial situation, you must know some basic accounting, which is very important, otherwise you will not learn the company's finance.
The second category is called asset pricing, in which your role has changed. From a company insider to an investor who evaluates the company's value and makes investments from the outside, there are other securities investments in this part of the course, mainly the pricing of stocks and bonds. Actually, it's still DCF, just from a different angle. And what kind of interest rate to discount, CAPM (capital asset pricing model, the name scares many people, learn it, hehe) APT (arbitrage pricing theory) and so on. There will also be specialized courses in pricing financial derivatives, and various derivatives, including futures option swaps, can also be nested at different levels, such as swap (option+swap). In order to learn this part well, mathematics is very important, and options should be a complex but exciting thing. Its pricing is something that has only been researched by academic circles in the last 30 years, that is, BSM (God bless me to spell the name correctly). To understand this thing, you need to learn some knowledge of stochastic processes and have a good mathematical foundation.
In addition, you need to know some financial common sense. You need to know about financial markets and financial institutions (this course is called financial markets and financial institutions). If you want to know the country's macro policies and basic interest rates, you need to study currency and banking.
So we can know what kind of basic courses you need from the above two kinds of courses (in fact, all the above courses are above grade two, and then mainly the first-year courses).
You have to study mathematics, including calculus (the course we study in our school is called Advanced Mathematics B), which is a little more difficult. If you see that derivatives have been exhausted, you'd better learn mathematical analysis, or this science, mathematics or physics), linear algebra (matrix or something, and then econometrics), probability statistics (which is much more difficult and important than your high school), and econometrics (an application of statistics is simply regression, which is a good way to exercise your thinking if you don't do it). As a finance graduate, you must study derivatives. So your math class should have Brownian motion and random process, but you will still be crushed by your math classmates (which is why many students in our college take double degrees in math)
You have to learn English, because foreign businessmen pay high wages (dirty, what are these values), because you will find that English in this line is not good and it is difficult to get along with. Many textbooks are poorly translated into Chinese, so you must read the English version and English literature. If you do academic English as your working language, if you go to industry, many investment banks and funds need English for interviews, and you have to write emails in English. Of course, you said you just wanted to work in a domestic industrial company, which is actually quite good. We advocate pluralistic values.
You have to learn the basics of economics, microeconomics and macroeconomics can't run away, and finance is a branch of the economy (feeling that the way of thinking is very different). Learning some economics can also let you analyze the pattern of some industries and so on. There is a basic framework.
You have to study accounting, as I said just now, which is a very important foundation; Learn a little psychology, because people are not always rational (rational person assumption is the most basic assumption of economy and finance), so I won't talk about other broken political lessons.
Well, that's basically my training. I am very academic and even think that the market is effective. The current market price is the price that stocks should have.
Then you must have heard of an investor named Buffett, who thinks what I said above is all bull (I don't translate good words).
Why? What you have learned in finance is probably the biggest difference from reality in all disciplines. Because almost all financial models you have learned have many assumptions, which have nothing to do with the real world (for example, people are rational, for example, one can invest in all investment products in the world with a little money, for example, everyone has the same understanding of information in each market). In fact, you can see all kinds of outrageous price deviations in the market, because finance is a prediction of the future. And people are very emotional about uncertain things in the future. When they go up, the momentum is like a rainbow, and when they go down, they are deeply grieved, even institutional investors, not to mention your neighbor Aunt Zhang (you should know that China stock market is 80% Aunt Zhang and 20% institutional investors).
Therefore, the real investment and financing courses in the college are two different things. For example, in college, you calculate the discount rate (actually CAPM) according to the volatility of a stock, and then discount the company's future cash flow, but Buffett never does this.
Therefore, finance is an extremely important subject in practice. Go out for an internship in a financial institution as soon as possible. Hello, I'm good, everyone. Simple theory and complicated practice are the characteristics of this subject. Unlike engineering, poor painting is really scum, and exams are scum and scum. Finance means that if you don't even know CAPM, you must be scum, but you are serious at work. . . Too simple, sometimes too naive.
In fact, there are many schools from the perspective of investment. Aside from technical analysis, the fundamentals include Buffett, who emphasizes value investment (even Buffett's early thinking is very different from Buffett's now), and Fisher, who emphasizes growth stocks. There are traders who do short-term trading, Soros who does global macro (he always pays attention to interest rates, exchange rates, commodity prices and so on, regardless of specific companies), and Fuxing Technology, a group of mathematicians and physicists who do high-frequency trading, just like many sects in the world, each has its own unique skills, depending on whether you like Emei or Shaoxia. . . )
At present, I am interested in value investment and recommend some books in this field. I can start with my grandfather Graham's Smart Investor, and then the Bible's Securities Analysis, which can be combined with Buffett's letters to shareholders from 1950s to 1970s. Let's take a look at "Common Stock (Unusual Profit)" written by Fisher, an old gentleman who influenced Buffett's current thinking. I am drunk, too. At the same time, I will read Buffett's letters after the 1980 s and see the change of his style. Seth Karaman should be said to be the third generation leader. His "Margin of Safety" is well written, and Qiu Guolu's "The Simplest Things in Investment" is considered as the practice of value investment in China.
At the same time, you should accumulate all kinds of knowledge, because investment is not a pipe dream. The investment concept must be based on the specific company, what is the business model of the company, what is the competition between upstream and downstream, and what is the future prospect. You can't learn it overnight, you can only refuel.
As for things like high-frequency trading, I don't understand and I won't talk nonsense. Just leave it to the great god.
This is just a standard thing. My ideal reader is a high school student who doesn't understand finance at all. I hope he knows what he will face in the next four years or even his whole life if he chooses to major in finance. I hope that people who are engaged in this line will choose it as their lifelong hobby on the premise of full disclosure of information, not because they are said to be forced by their parents to make more money. After all, people spend about one-third of their lives working. If you do something you don't like, it's torture for yourself, your family and your boss. Instead of caring about Aunt Zhang bragging about how much money you earn from studying finance, it is better to calm down and collect more information and ask your inner voice.