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Like the other guy said you are likely better off just learning the basics of personal finance and financial planning/wealth management. For someone who only really wants to dabble in investment on the side, you will have a hard time beating just passive investing. If that book is anything like the other ones I've seen it will probably focus on how to price and construct various securities contracts (i.e. options) and maybe some risk management or portfolio theory if you're lucky. In practice, profiting by finding pricing discrepancies based on standard mathematical analysis is highly unlikely for individuals as these are squeezed out by people with faster computers and fiber optic connections to the exchange, and often the margins on these discrepancies are so small it doesn't even make sense to try for them unless you are able to make many many trades during a day. If you are willing to take in exogenous data you may have better luck but you would need to develop your own models, a good knowledge of statistics would serve you best here. Risk management and portfolio planning can be useful for an individual, but it can be a lot of legwork for, in expectation, not a large payoff compared to index investing. That is also an area that tends to make more sense for individuals/institutions with large net worths that are willing to invest time/money into maintaining their wealth than rapidly growing it.