# 🎼 Prelude

By [Let Them Eat Cake](https://paragraph.com/@ltecake) · 2022-06-16

---

**TL,DR: Welcome to a long winded and time intensive response to a question I have been asked hundres of times: “What should I invest in?” and to which I’ve responded with consistency and admonishment: “It depends”.**

”Having money isn’t everything. Not having it is.“

This adage from the wise shepherd of our generation, Kanye Omare West, rings true for the rich, the poor and everyone in between. People ask me all the time what they should invest in, likely because I work for a financial services company, or possibly because they listened to Kanye’s advice. Unfortunately for people, while I am a Registered Representive of a Broker Dealer (which means I can buy and sell financial products on behalf of investment managers and individuals), my expertise resides in designing and building financial trading platforms, and not in making stock recommendations. Additionally, Kanye is neither a Registered Representative nor a Certified Financial Planner. He made a salient point about achieving financial stability without pausing to provide a path to get there.

Fortunately, “Digestible Investing: A tasty guide to the world’s most important financial concepts and products” is that path.

It’s an encyclopedia of financial terms and defintions, crafted into an allegory of palatable proprotions, and fueled by almost 2 decades of learning about financial concepts. My path to financial independence started at 7 years old, when I asked my dad to explain the stock market. He told me it was a place where people bought and sold shares of publicly traded companies. I looked deep into his eyes, utterly confused, and returned to my practice of isolating the marshmellows from the oats in my bowl of lucky charms. Since then I have studied financial economics, worked as a financial services consultant, and passed the Series 7 in order to practice as a licensed Registered Representative. You could say I started from the bottom of my class in a notoriously wealthy Boston suburb. Since then I’ve drawn inspiration from iconic works of art, ranging from killer Kanye lyrics, to Anthony Bourdain’s satanic sarcasm in _Kitchen Confidential_, to Margot Robbie’s provactive précis on Mortgage Backed Securities in a bathtub during _The Wolf of Wall Street_, to John Updike’s fundamental foray into the lessons garned from a visit to the grocery store in _A&P_.  Now we’re here. Now my whole team \*\*\*\*\* here.

I hope you brought your appetite.

---

*Originally published on [Let Them Eat Cake](https://paragraph.com/@ltecake/prelude)*