Michael Lewis has written a very funny book. He describes the life of investment bank in middle 1980's on wall street. For anyone who wants to know what is the life about trading and selling in the dynamic 1980's, this book will be invaluable for them. You will also learn how Soloman Brothers have earned tons of million by selling mortgage bonds and how it failed later. It's an interesting history in finance, a legend of a wall street bank and funny stories of the bankers.

     Another funny book in investment banking. The authors talked about their miserable life as analyst and associate in an investment bank. How they thought there will be an oasis in the desert of investment bank and how they finally found they were inside a jungle of dangers without boundary and how they act as monkeys swinging from one tree to another without having any personal life. If you want to know what is the life of an investment bank associate, you'd better open this book.

    The book is Derman's self-portray of his journey from academia to wall street. Emanuel Derman has a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia. Shortly after his Post doc at University of Pennsylvania, he moved to AT&T Bell Lab where he began to program. In 1985, he finally moved to Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he became a managing director in 1997. He is the SunGard/IAFE Financial Engineer of the Year in 2000 and was appointed to the Risk Hall of Fame in 2002. He is now the Director of the Program in Financial Engineering at Columbia University and lives in New York City. It is of future quants' interest to learn how he converted from a physicist, an engineer to a quant and finally achieved high fame in the whole new world. He began the book from his Ph.D life at Columbia University and started to describe his academic life which I found no interest. In the second part of the book, he then talks about the life at Goldman Sachs, which is much interesting for quant-minds. You can also learn about the so-called 'implied volatility', which is the 'smile' intriguing many quants in equity and still an active research area in finance. He has a personal website with his publications listed.

    This so-called "BKM" Investments book is widely used in U.S. MBA schools. It is must-have for anyone wants to know the financial maket, portfolio theory, Capital Asset Pricing Model, Fixed Income Securities, Options, Portfolio Management. It is so comprehensive that you can find almost every aspect of finance in the book. As many quants don't have adequate background in finance, especially in background of portfolio theory, this is a good book for them to stand at the same line with MBAs. The portfolio theory is so important as well as the CAPM theory, they are another evidence of financial applications of theoretical research in academic. Their inventors won Nobel Prize as well. You don't need to finish all the book since it's so thick. But one should at least learn well the portfolio theory and CAPM and put them on your resume. The book requires no advanced mathmatics and therefore financial sense is strengthened through the reading.