Finance is not just a game of math and numbers–in fact, those who succeed in the industry tend to have two other skills that are much more important.

They say demographics is destiny, and they aren’t wrong. But that doesn’t mean we can just buy and sell stocks according to the flows of demographic change–the world is much more complicated! To incorporate demographics in a financial analysis, we need to think beyond buying and selling. We need to get multidimensional.

We continue digging into margin by looking at how short margin accounts different from long accounts and why shorting stock presents very different kinds of risks to accounts. Want to know why some hedge funds blow up and others don’t? Start here.

Leverage is an essential part of finance, and understanding how it works can benefit traders; misunderstanding it can wipe out accounts, and often has!

To model assets properly you need to vectorize the qualitative. Sound weird? It is–but it’s also a lot of fun.

If you know how credit, leverage, borrowing, and liquidity are interrelated, good for you–you have some instinct for the financial game. But the details are very important, because they demonstrate why some people become billionaires using borrowed money and others go bankrupt.