In the study of any subject , one starts with understanding basic principles / Laws. If it Physics, may be one starts off with basic laws governing universe, If it is Math, one starts with axioms , lemmas , theorems etc. What about Finance and Economics, which are more of a social science than hard sciences ? Well, the first one is obviously, Demand and Supply Law..and then….most economists and folks from finance BELIEVE in “Law of One Price”, which says that identical goods must be priced the same.

One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup’s stock. The attractiveness of course, is that you can make more successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet. - Jim Simons

**“For an interest to be rewarding, one must pay in discipline and dedication, especially though the difficult or boring stages which are inevitably encountered” ** - Mira Komarovsky

Any freshman will know that integral of (1/x) between 0 and 1 doesn’t converge. But integral of (1/x^2) between 0 and 1 does converge.But WHY ? Questions often , even as simple as this , are not given time and the outcome is - we spend most of our lives on answering somebody else’s questions rather than posing questions. A particularly nice way of looking at this convergence cropped up when Anupam gave this insight, while discussing Fourier Transforms.

If you train hard, you’ll not only be hard, you’ll be hard to beat. - Herschel Walker