One of the main tips you will get from reading books about investment is to not go with your emotions when you make a financial decision. Since most marketing and advertising plays on consumer emotions, it is important to understand how marketing works. A maraketing class can help you to understand if a company is truly valuable or if they simply seem like they are valuable. This will also help you to see if a company is marketing themselves well to their consumers, which may be a clue for you to invest in them. Understanding another step in the process of business will also help you to understand more about investment.
Accounting teaches many basic principles which are important to understanding the concept of money and investment. Some accounting principles include the balance sheet, financial statement, inventory, cash flow, assets, and liabilities. Accounting also teaches a great deal about taxes, which you must know in depth to reap all potential benefits from your investments. An understanding of accounting will also help you to look at businesses you wish to invest in from a different perspective.
Taking a course in economics gives you a top-down view of how the economy is currently running. You will be able to determine how goods are produced, consumed, and distributed, and you can see how people have invested their money wisely or poorly in the past. This understanding will help you to determine where your money should be put into the future. Take both microeconomics and macroeconomics, and it does not hurt to have a background in calculus to work on advanced problems in the classes.
Finance classes are important because they help you to understand what is happening with your money when it is in an investment and out of your direct control. This class can get you to understand the time value of money and the different methods you can use to invest your money. This is another class that will take a bit of math to get through, but as a result you will have a more comprehensive understanding of investments.
To understand accounting, economics, and finance, you need to have a strong mathematical background. Math classes teach you how to apply specific numbers to the concepts you use in many business classes. If you learn to think in such a way that you can work out complicated stock prices and returns on investment in your head, you will have a distinct advantage over other investors. Some classes of note that are helpful are statistics, algebra, and calculus.