Business Dynamics

If you loved Thinking In Systems: A Primer, you may want to read Business Dynamics by John Sterman [1], one of the proponents and pioneers (after Jay Forrester) of systems dynamics. It's a textbook, but even so it is readable and engaging. Systems thinking changes the way people think about solutions, often for the better (but not always). There's a tendency to think: "uh... it's the system, nothing's gonna change unless we change the _system_ per se". And that's correct. But individual actions also change systemic outputs. So. Case in point: climate change and all that... [fun fact, I took a class with Sterman at MIT. He's fantastic, very engaging!] [1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman

Here are my recommendations. This list is optimised to teach you the fundamentals of economics and finance, give you alternative perspectives on status quo economic/financial thinking and then equip with you with tools, ideas, and concepts to come up with original investment ideas and increase the likelihood that they are going to actually make you, your clients, and your firm a lot of money without anybody getting grilled by the House Financial Services Committee, the SEC, or ending up in jail. 1.) Get a recent copy of the CFA curriculum and do the end of chapter exercises. You can probably skip a lot of the quantitative methods material if you’re doing a degree in stats. The CFA curriculum will give you a solid understanding of all the major sub-categories of economics (micro, macro, corporate finance, security analysis, accounting, financial statement analysis, alternative investments, derivatives, portfolio management, and most importantly ethical standards for financial professionals.…