Best Reads for Investment Banking

There are an abundance of books on finance that can help build and refine your financial understanding. This is a list of resources that we have recommended to our students as materials to supplement their learning in the past.

Textbooks

Frankly, most finance textbooks tend to be pretty dense and cannot be read like a normal book. As is the case with most textbooks. Most students that I recommend these books to will purchase them but not flip a page. However, they are especially useful to reference and come back to when you run into common questions or have a good foundation established.

Investment Banking: Valuation, LBOs, M&A, and IPOs
By: Rosenbaum and Pearl

This is a cornerstone book for almost all investment bankers that goes into practical applications. It is the best book for those looking to see how M&A and LBOs are addressed on the job written by former investment bankers.

Security Analysis
By Benjamin Graham

Extremely dense read. Most people have a copy but never read fully through it. It’s better used as a source of reference or building depth. Can be quite intimidating and dry otherwise.

Leveraged Buyouts
By Paul Pignataro

Similar to the book above but goes into much more detail on financial modeling behind leveraged buyout transactions with case studies.

Venture Deals
By Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Provides a full real-world perspective on the structure and strategy behind venture capital. Useful for both investors and early stage founders to understand the landscape of VC.

Investment Valuation
By Aswath Damodaran

Applied Corporate Finance
By Aswath Damodaran

Aswath is a professor at NYU and guru when it comes to financial valuation. His writings go into great depths of the traditional approaches to valuation and help highlight the shortcomings and strengths as a strong believer in fundamental analysis.

Books

Finance books are definitely easier to read through than traditional textbooks. However, most finance books assume that students have a baseline understanding of at least accounting. Without understanding accounting, going into finance materials will be challenging, and you will not fully understand the basis.