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FreeYouTube · 30 min
Watch this twice. Covers credit, debt cycles, deleveraging, and the role of central banks in plain language. The single best 30 minutes in financial education. Everything else in this curriculum builds on the mental model it gives you.
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FreeKhan Academy
Stocks, bonds, derivatives, basic valuation. No prior knowledge assumed. Complete the introductory sequences in order before opening any of the books.
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FreeYouTube · 47 min
Lynch's clearest statement of his investing philosophy: own what you can explain, find your informational edge, and resist the urge to predict. Watch the psychology timestamps on panic selling and volatility before anything else in this curriculum.
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FreeYouTube · 2.5 min
The most famous two-and-a-half minutes in economics education. Friedman uses a pencil to show how the price system coordinates millions of strangers into voluntary cooperation — without any central authority.
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FreeYouTube · ~2 hrs
This week: time value of money and the basics of how returns are measured. Sessions 1–2 only. Sessions 3–6 are covered in Week 4 once you have more context.
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A Random Walk Down Wall StreetBookSelected Chapters OnlyCore
The classic entry point to investing. This week, read the selected chapters below. The full book is returned to in Week 5 once you have more context to appreciate the remaining sections.
Chapters to read this week:
Part 1 (Ch. 1–2): What investing is, and the two competing theories for how assets get priced
Part 2 (Ch. 3–5): The history of speculative manias — tulips, the 1920s, the dot-com crash. Read alongside Dalio's economic machine video for maximum effect
Part 4 (Ch. 11–12): Practical guidance on how to actually invest
Skip Parts 3 for now. Return to the full book in Week 5.
Can you explain what a price signal communicates? Can you describe the difference between a stock and a bond? Do you understand why compounding is powerful over time?
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FreeKhan Academy
A visual, beginner-friendly introduction to the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Watch these first. They make the terminology in the book much easier to absorb.
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Financial Statement Analysis: Selected ChaptersBookSelected Chapters OnlyCore
You do not need to read this cover to cover. The chapters below give you everything relevant at this stage without the advanced accounting detail that isn't useful yet.
Chapters to read:
Ch. 1: The Financial Statements: An Overview
Ch. 2: The Income Statement
Ch. 3: The Balance Sheet
Ch. 4: The Statement of Cash Flows
Ch. 6: Revenue Recognition and Earnings Quality (skim: key idea is that not all earnings are equal)
Ch. 9: Credit Analysis Basics (skim: useful for spotting dangerous debt loads)
Can you open an annual report and find the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement? Do you know what revenue, gross profit, operating income, and free cash flow mean? Can you tell the difference between a company that is profitable and one that is actually generating cash?
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FreeYouTube · 12 min
A fast, beginner-friendly primer on macroeconomics: GDP, unemployment, inflation, and how governments use fiscal and monetary policy to manage the economy. Watch this first to establish the vocabulary before going into Dalio and Capital Flows.
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FreeYouTube · ~45 minCore
Extends the Week 1 framework into the longer arc, covering reserve currencies, geopolitical shifts, and the pattern every major empire has followed. Watch all five parts in order.
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FreeYouTube · ~35 minCore
A clear, accessible walkthrough of how interest rates function as the central mechanism of macro regimes: how they rise and fall, how they reward or punish different asset classes, and how nations rise and fall with them. Watch this alongside the Dalio debt cycle material.
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Free PDFCore
The archetypal template. Explains the short and long debt cycle in detail, and why every episode of sovereign debt excess ends the same way: financial repression, restructuring, inflation, or war.
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The Most Important ThingBookCore
Cycles, risk, and investment temperament from one of the clearest thinkers alive. Key chapters: second-level thinking, understanding market cycles, and the relationship between risk and price.
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Devil Takes the HindmostBookCore
A history of financial speculation from the tulip mania to the dot-com crash. Chancellor documents how the same patterns of easy credit, herd behaviour, and the suspension of disbelief repeat across every major bubble in history. The best book for understanding that markets have always been this way, and always will be.
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Free
Start with The Most Important Thing (2003) and You Can't Predict. You Can Prepare. (2001). Short, free, excellent, and constantly updated by Howard Marks even in 2026.
Can you explain what a debt cycle is in plain terms? Do you understand what financial repression means and why governments use it? Can you describe why rising interest rates hurt bond prices and asset valuations?
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FreeKhan Academy
The mechanics of bonds before anything else: what a bond is, how coupon payments work, why bond prices move inversely to yields, what duration measures, and the basics of credit spreads. Short, free, and correct. Watch this before Damodaran.
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FreeYouTube · ~4 hrs
Sessions 3–4 cover risk-free rates and equity risk premiums — why some assets pay more than others. Sessions 5–6 cover betas and how to measure the risk of individual assets. Damodaran gives a conventional framework; Taleb in Week 5 shows you where it breaks down.
Can you explain why bond prices fall when interest rates rise? Can you describe what duration measures and why a longer-duration bond is more sensitive to rate moves? Can you explain what a credit spread tells you, and why it widens during periods of market stress?
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FreeYouTube · ~55 min
Soros explains reflexivity: how market participants' beliefs don't merely reflect reality but actively reshape it, creating self-reinforcing feedback loops. Paired with Alchemy of Finance Ch. 1–3.
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FreeYouTube · ~75 minWatch Before the Book
Taleb's full Stanford Tech Talk on Antifragile. Can be watched before opening the book.
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A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Full BookBook
Return to Malkiel and read the book in full this week. Part 3 covers technical and fundamental analysis in detail, the chapters skipped in Week 1. With the fixed income framework from Week 4 and Taleb's critique of standard models now in your head, the market efficiency debate and the limits of analysis will make considerably more sense.
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The Black SwanBook
Why standard risk models fail catastrophically at the edges. The core argument: rare, high-impact events are not outliers to be ignored, but are the most important events of all.
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AntifragileBookCore
My favourite of the curriculum. Taleb's most complete and actionable work. If you read one book from this entire list, make it this one. It rewards re-reading.
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Skin in the GameBook
The core argument is symmetry: you should never be able to put others at risk while bearing none of it yourself. Without shared exposure to downside, incentives corrupt and systems rot. Read last in the trilogy.
Can you explain what a barbell strategy is in plain terms? Do you understand why a portfolio with large safe positions and small high-upside bets can outperform a "balanced" moderate-risk portfolio? Can you describe what makes a system antifragile rather than just robust?
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FreeYouTube · ~1 hrCore
One of the most honest and practically useful interviews from Druckenmiller and Soros. Covers concentration, macro intuition, and position sizing when you have genuine conviction.
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FreeYouTube · 50 min
Monopoly thinking, moat analysis, and how to evaluate whether a business has durable competitive advantage. Changes how you look at equity selection.
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FreeYouTube · ~1 hr
Burry's 2011 Vanderbilt lecture on how he built his contrarian thesis and held his conviction against the consensus during the GFC.
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The Little Book of Behavioral InvestingBookCore
The clearest survey of the psychological biases that cost investors money: overconfidence, loss aversion, herding, anchoring, the disposition effect. Montier shows exactly how professional fund managers fall prey to them, backed by evidence.
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The Art of ExecutionBookCore
Freeman-Shore studied what top fund managers actually did when they were wrong. Core finding: having a correct idea is nearly worthless. What destroys returns is execution — how you manage losers, size winners, and hold conviction under pressure.
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The Alchemy of Finance: Chapters 1–3BookFirst 3 Chapters Only
Reflexivity: market participants' biased views don't just reflect reality. They actively shape it. The first three chapters contain the core idea. The rest of the book is optional.
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Superforecasting: The Art and Science of PredictionBookCore
Most experts are terrible forecasters, but a small group consistently outperforms by breaking problems into parts, updating beliefs with new evidence, and staying calibrated about uncertainty. Taleb explains the limits of prediction; Tetlock shows how to forecast better within those limits.
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The Wisdom of CrowdsBookCore
Surowiecki's argument is that under the right conditions — diversity, independence, decentralisation — groups consistently outperform individual experts. The book also shows precisely when those conditions break down and crowds become mobs instead.
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The Big Short / Liar's PokerBookOptional
The Big Short makes Taleb and behavioural finance visceral, following real people with skin in the game betting against a consensus herd through 2008. Liar's Poker shows how Wall Street institutions actually behave versus how they present themselves.
Can you explain how Taleb, Soros, Montier, and Surowiecki connect into one framework? Can you name a historical market mania and describe why it followed the same pattern as ones before it? Can you name the execution archetype you think you are, and honestly explain why it will cost you money if you don't address it?
Complete Resource List
Portfolio construction and position sizing. This is a genuine gap rather than a deliberate exclusion. How to size positions, Kelly Criterion, and concentrating vs diversifying bets deserves its own treatment and is inadequately covered here. The Druckenmiller interview gestures at it but does not address it systematically. This is worth pursuing separately once this curriculum is absorbed.
Short selling, derivatives, options, structured products. Worth understanding as a mental discipline as it forces rigorous thinking about what can go wrong with a thesis. They also require the foundation this curriculum builds before they are safely approachable, and I confess I am not experienced on that side of the equation.
Personal finance. Budgeting, insurance, debt management, and tax efficiency are outside the scope of this framework. If you have read this far I would assume you are intelligent enough to figure it out yourself.
And as always, not financial advice :)
"You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."— Good Will Hunting