It’s great that you’re eager to learn—your background in data science actually gives you a big edge in understanding personal finance logically. I’d recommend starting with practical, proven resources like the Bogleheads wiki and the book “The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing.” They focus on simple, long-term strategies that work.

The MIT Finance Theory course is solid, but it’s more academic and may be overkill for personal finance goals. Start with foundational topics: budgeting, saving, indexing, risk tolerance, and tax efficiency—especially in the EU context.

Thankfully there’s now an easy way to maximize your return/risk ratio: Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Before ETFs you had two options: choose individual stocks and risk choosing wrong, or pay a financial consultant outrageous fees to do it for you.

ETFs allows you to track the market, which over time only goes up, minimizing your risk. They also (usually) charge very low fees, which increases your returns.

If you are interested in US equities, VOO, which tracks the S&P 500, has a gross expense ratio (ie how much you pay them) of .03%. Considering how 20 years ago you might have paid a financial advisor 3%, it’s literally 100th of the cost. QQQM, which tracks the NASDAQ has a GER of .15%, is also good.

As an Italian, you might also be interested in an EWI, which tracks Italian stock performance, and has actually done pretty well the last year. However it has GER of .50%, so you’ll be paying a bit more. I’m not sure if you have access to different products there, so might be something to look in to. European stocks have done pretty well of late, so you may also want to look into ETFs for other countries (DAX for Germany, EWP for Spain, EWQ for France, etc). Finally you may want to consider emerging markets, like EMXC for China.

Again you may have access to different products, I’m not sure how that works, but basically any ETF which tracks a developed or high growth emerging market country would be good to add to your portfolio, and you should prioritize those with low GER to maximize your returns.

Lastly, I would STRONGLY encourage you to not even look into things like options, futures, shorting etc. Your focus as a retail investor should be to maximize your return to risk ratio.

If the market dips 10%, and you’ve put in 10k, it’s sad to see 1k “go away” but if you wait a few more days/weeks/months and just not sell and realize that loss, it has literally always bounces back (unlike an individual company), and you suffer no negative effects.

But futures, options and shorts, while potentially more rewarding, have outcomes where you can get really fucked, have to pay everything you have and more, and be left with nothing. It’s just not worth it IMO.

Learn about mutual funds and ETFs. I think the EU has these. Learn about 3 fund portfolios and the Bogehead approach. Adapt it to the EU. Avoid individual securities except bonds are sometimes useful.

I prefer and recommend the very simple boglehead approach to investing. Simple 3 fund portfolio, focused on long term growth.

https://a.co/d/8xXwikV

Lots of forums on their website, but basic idea is split your money into a healthy mix of total market, international, and some bonds. Focus on tax advantaged retirement accounts. Invest early and often.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads®_investment_philosophy

Specific guidance for Italy: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investing_from_Italy

Idk how banks work over in the EU, but in the US most banks have in-house financial investors who you can work with specifically for this kind of stuff. There’s also separate investment firms who you can work with, some of which provide tools for people who want a closer handle on their own money. Point is I wouldn’t recommend doing it alone, at least not without talking to an investment expert first.

Another tip, from the guy I invested with, is don’t pull out the first year just cause it was a rocky start, cause markets as a whole are unpredictable and you’ll prolly make it back and more within the next 2 years

Probably a bit of a no-no linking to reddit, but I don’t know of any active FIRE community on lemmy.

FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Check out the wiki links for the EU FIRE community for a lot of info, and what they recommend to do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EuropeFIRE/

Wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/eupersonalfinance/wiki/index/

I might ask a librarian for good books on it. Investopedia can also help break things down.

My personal, unsolicited advice (edit: this is US-based advice, I’m not familiar with EU regs): I personally prefer low to medium risk stuff like the S&P 500 index funds and mutual funds. Max your 401k if your company matches it. Dump that into an IRA whenever you switch jobs. HSAs are a pretty decent deal if you live in the US and your company offers one.

Mostly, it’s about saving and investing whatever you have, and not spending all of your money. You don’t need to be a genius on this stuff. Lower risk investments + time = good outcomes. As you get higher paying jobs, keep investing more and more into your retirement and investment accounts.

Learn about index funds and “dollar averaging”. The rest is just adding risk that you won’t get paid for. It will take an hour or two. No more. You will do better than most folks with this and sleep nicer.

Before you get into those, it’s worth writing down your investment goals. What generally are you trying to accomplish? When you start reading more about investment, some people are going to try to push you into day trading. Obviously investing itself is not guaranteed, it’s a kind of gambling, but all of the short-term stuff is particularly close to casino gambling. Be careful of that.

Having knowledge of a field and knowing what is and what isn’t BS can be very useful. For example when AMD released their Ryzen architecture their stock didn’t rise much, but their product performance improvement was massive. Though keep in mind that in the end it’s mostly sales which determine stock price. Having a great product doesn’t do anything for a company if they fail to sell it.

Once they told me that the biggest difference between good investors and bad investors is the amount of capital they can move. Good investors have large capitals that can absorb market drops and then rise again. Bad investors are wiped out by small fluctuations. In other words, what works for who drives large funds will hardly work as well for the average bloke. Keep it in mind whatever you read.

Assuming that you wouldn’t ask here if you had large capitals, I recommend you to keep it simple and invest in funds with low commissions (like ETFs) tracking something like companies with very solid brands that will never go out of business (like Coca Cola). With 4/5 points of return above the inflation over 10/20 years you’ll have good results.

If you feel lucky, put 5-10% in something high risk high reward and be prepared to lose half of it. Read whatever you find to understand the jargon (e.g. what’s a “synthetic” ETF) and you should be fine with those simple tools. Don’t forget to study the fiscal aspects, especially in regards of dividends and capital gain: often there are two version of the same fund, but one is more “fiscally efficient”. Last advice: keep aside cash for emergencies because you don’t want to sell your positions in the middle of a crisis.

I’m not a fan and sometimes they are full of BS, but you can check forums on FIRA (for early retirement).

For me, it was the money guy show.

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