Learning Paths

An atlas is not a syllabus. These are routes through it, each in an order where every page assumes only what came before.

Education only, as everywhere on this site — see the disclaimer.

Path 1 — Foundations: your first ten products

The core instruments almost everything else is built from. After these ten, nothing else in the atlas is unreadable.

1. Common stock — ownership, the primitive everything references
2. Government bond — lending, yield and the risk-free anchor
3. ETF — how most people should probably own both of the above
4. Treasury bill — cash, properly understood
5. Corporate bond — credit risk enters the picture
6. FX spot — currencies, the water everything swims in
7. Equity future — your first derivative: linear, honest
8. Equity option — asymmetry, premium and the Greeks
9. Mutual fund & closed-end fund — wrappers and why their plumbing matters
10. REIT — real assets in a listed wrapper

Then take the quiz on each of the category pages you've touched — and when you've walked a path or two, sit the Market ExamSome background helps: 15 random questions across the whole atlas.

Path 2 — The options track

From first call to volatility as an asset class. The strategy builder is your lab bench throughout — rebuild each product's payoff as you go.

1. Equity option — calls, puts, premium, the Greeks
2. Warrant — options as securities, with dilution
3. Employee stock option — the option most people actually hold
4. FX option — same machine, currency conventions
5. Barrier option & digital option — path dependence and all-or-nothing
6. Swaption — optionality on interest rates
7. Variance swap — volatility itself as the underlying
8. Crypto option — the same theory at 60 vol

Path 3 — Rates, credit & macro plumbing

The professional core: how banks, treasuries and funds move interest-rate and credit risk around — and what breaks when the plumbing clogs.

1. T-bill → repo — cash and collateral, the system's base layer
2. OIS — the clean policy-rate curve
3. Interest rate swap — the workhorse; DV01 thinking
4. FRA & STIR futures — trading the meeting-by-meeting path
5. Basis swap — where "one interest rate" becomes several
6. CDS → CDS index — default risk, isolated and traded
7. Leveraged loan → CLO → CDO & tranches — securitisation, start to finish
8. Cross-currency swap — the dollar system's pressure gauge

Path 4 — Structured products, decoded

The retail shelf, taken apart. The pattern to watch for: every "attractive" structure is funded by an option you sold without seeing the premium.

1. Equity option — you need the raw ingredient first
2. Discount certificate — covered call in a wrapper
3. Reverse convertible — the sold put, with a coupon costume
4. Bonus certificate — the barrier that voids the insurance
5. Knock-out certificate — leverage with a trapdoor
6. Factor certificate — leverage with a treadmill
7. Autocallable — the structurer's flagship
8. FX accumulator — the cautionary tale, in full

Closing exercise: for any structured product you ever encounter, name (1) the option you are implicitly selling, (2) what funds the headline benefit, and (3) the scenario the brochure doesn't chart. The four pages above teach the pattern; it generalises to the whole shelf.

Path 5 — Risk: measuring what can go wrong

Every path above teaches an instrument. This one teaches the discipline that decides whether you survive owning it. Read in order — each measure exists because the previous one was insufficient.

1. VolatilitySome background helps — realised vs. implied, and why annualised numbers hide daily reality
2. Diversification & correlationStart here — the only free lunch, and when it is withdrawn
3. Risk measuresSome background helps — VaR, expected shortfall, beta, tracking error, and what each one hides
4. Stress testing — the measure that needs no distribution at all
5. Margin & collateralSome background helps — where risk becomes a same-day cash demand
6. Portfolio practiceStart here — rebalancing bands, sequence risk, the behaviour gap

Closing exercise: take any portfolio and answer three questions — what is its 10-day 99% VaR, what does the 2022 scenario cost it, and which single holding carries the largest share of its risk? If the third answer surprises you, that is the point of the path.

Path 6 — Corporate finance & valuation

From "what discount rate?" to "what is this worth?" to "what did the company just do to my shares?". The track for anyone reading company accounts rather than trading screens.

1. NPV & IRRStart here — discounting from first principles, and the classic IRR traps
2. Valuation & cost of capitalSome background helps — CAPM, WACC, the tax shield, EV/EBITDA
3. The full DCF — and how much of the answer is one perpetuity assumption
4. Common stock → preferred stock — the claims being valued
5. Corporate actionsSome background helps — dividends, splits, buybacks, rights, spin-offs, M&A
6. Rights issue → convertible bond — how companies actually raise capital
7. High-yield bond → leveraged loan — the same company seen from the debt side

Path 7 — Costs, wrappers & the practice of owning things

The least glamorous path and, measured over decades, plausibly the most consequential. Nothing here is about picking well; all of it is about keeping what you picked.

1. Costs & feesStart here — the six layers, and what a percent a year compounds into
2. ETF vs. mutual fund vs. tracker certificate — same exposure, three legal positions
3. Closed-end fund — when price and value are allowed to disagree
4. Securities lending — the revenue inside your index fund, and its one real risk
5. Market microstructureSome background helps — what happens between clicking Buy and owning something
6. The withdrawal phase — where the order of returns starts to matter
7. Savings deposit → money market fund → T-bill — the cash ladder, each step trading one comfort for one improvement

Path 8 — A history of things breaking

19 case studies in rough order of what they teach. Read after Path 5 — the mechanisms land harder once the measures that failed to catch them are familiar.

1. Barings, 1995Start here — the controls failure, before any market risk enters
2. Metallgesellschaft, 1993Some background helps — a correct hedge with the wrong cash-flow timing
3. LTCM, 1998Some background helps — leverage as a time limit on being right
4. Amaranth, 2006Some background helps — when your own exit is the loss
5. Subprime, 2008Some background helps — one national bet, tranched and multiplied
6. The Swiss franc floor, 2015Start here — suppressed volatility is stored volatility
7. Volmageddon, 2018Some background helps — a hedge that had to buy what was destroying it
8. Negative oil, 2020Some background helps — a physical constraint priced through zero
9. Archegos, 2021Some background helps — leverage invisible because it was fragmented
10. The short squeeze, 2021Start here — the week clearing margin became the story
11. The UK LDI crisis, 2022Assumes the mechanics — hedging correctly and nearly failing anyway
12. FTX, 2022Start here — custody that was not custody
13. The AT1 write-down, 2023Some background helps — the hierarchy was a document all along
14. Black Monday, 1987Start here — a crash with no news, caused by insurance that was a sell order
15. The Asian crisis, 1997Start here — borrowing in a currency you do not earn
16. The dot-com bust, 2000Start here — right about the technology, wrong about the price
17. Wirecard, 2020Start here — cash that never existed, inside a blue-chip index
18. The nickel squeeze, 2022Some background helps — a producer hedge became the squeezed short
19. Silicon Valley Bank, 2023Start here — no credit risk, and gone in two days

Then take the case-studies quiz, and sit the Market ExamSome background helps — 142 questions in the pool, 15 dealt at random from products, concepts and crises alike.

Path 9 — Reading the documents

Every product arrives as paperwork, and the paperwork is where the terms actually live. This path is the shortest route from "I hold this" to "I know what I hold". It needs no maths and can be walked first.

1. The key information documentStart here — three pages, one of which is a fact and two of which are models
2. A fund factsheetStart here — forty numbers, six that decide the outcome
3. Your own broker statementStart here — where withholding tax and FX charges actually appear
4. A bond quoteSome background helps — clean, dirty, three yields and a settlement convention
5. An option chainSome background helps — the screen every options trade starts from
6. A credit ratingSome background helps — an ordinal opinion about one narrow question
7. An annual reportSome background helps — cash flow first, notes second, narrative last
8. A central bank statementSome background helps — the decision is priced; the wording is not
9. A structured product term sheetAssumes the mechanics — find the option you sold, then price it

Then put it to work: run a portfolio reviewStart here and size a positionStart here — the two playbooks that are methods rather than documents.

Path 10 — Choosing between two things

Most real questions are not "what is this" but "which of these two". Each page states the trade-off explicitly and says what both camps leave out.

1. ETF vs. fund vs. certificateStart here — one exposure, three failure modes
2. Accumulating vs. distributingStart here — same fund, two ISINs, one real difference
3. Active vs. passiveStart here — the part that is arithmetic rather than opinion
4. Individual bonds vs. bond fundsStart here — one matures and one does not
5. Hedged vs. unhedgedSome background helps — near-settled for bonds, genuinely open for equities
6. Fixed vs. floatingSome background helps — which uncertainty you would rather carry
7. Four ways to own goldStart here — two of which behave like gold
8. Market vs. limit ordersStart here — one trade-off underneath all of them
9. Warrant vs. turbo vs. optionSome background helps — one is cleared, two are promises

Where to go after the paths

• Step back from the products and read the analyses — 9 frameworks that hold across everything on the site, from what actually drives a return to how products fail. These are what transfers to instruments this atlas has never covered.
• Drill the vocabulary with the flashcard deckStart here — 233 terms, graded by you, stored only on your device.
• Rebuild every payoff you meet in the strategy builderSome background helps. If you cannot reconstruct a product's payoff from calls, puts and stock, you do not yet understand it.
• Run the arithmetic yourself — all 113 calculators in one place. A claim you have not recomputed is somebody else's claim.