A pal of mine recently told me that I should read the 1922 investing classic: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Illustrated (A Marketplace Book) by Edwin Lefèvre is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s. The book is a collection of interviews with the fictitious Lawrence [...]
After reading this book, I’m convinced that humans are programmed to not learn from history.
Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor covers financial speculation from Tulip Mania through the LTCM crisis of 1998. The book was published prior to the dot-com crash. Even though I found the early chapters [...]
In my post Ignore My Financial Advice, one of my tips was to read financial history. One aspect of financial history I’d like to address is this baby-boomer nonsense that the stock market always goes up in the long term.
I guess that depends on what you consider the long term.
Before anyone invests in the stock [...]
One of my favorite genres of reading is financial history and nobody does a better job than Roger Lowenstein.
Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing by Roger Lowenstein takes you through the economic history leading up and covering the stock market crash of 2000-2002. This book is outstanding and I enjoyed it [...]
Despite having one of the least attractive book covers I’ve ever seen, Just What I Said is an outstanding collection of economic columns from one of the best, Caroline Baum.
Just What I Said: Bloomberg Economics Columnist Takes on Bonds, Banks, Budgets, and Bubbles by Caroline Baum is nice collection of economic articles from the period [...]
A few people in the last month have asked me for financial advice. Giving financial advice is a delicate and risky endeavor. It’s not like fitness or nutritional advice (which I no longer give).
If I tell an overweight person to lift weights and stop drinking alcohol, the worst thing that can happen is the person [...]
Why the modern world can’t seem to predict outlier events with extreme impact is the focus of the book The Black Swan.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is not an easy read. It goes deep into mathematical history and philosophy. But the concepts buried in the academic name-dropping [...]
My Thanksgiving reading marathon continues.
The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun is interesting book which dispels many of the myths surrounding the invention process. The book is chock full of history and should be required reading for anyone that aspires to innovate.
This book reminded me a little of a blog post I read earlier this [...]
Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was the hedge fund that imploded in 1998. It used massive amounts of leverage to generate high returns. As long as that leverage works in your favor, you can make a lot of money. When you bet wrong, that leverage can unwind and destroy you. This is that tale.
When Genius Failed: [...]
I just finished reading a great book called The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle.
It covers the history of the search engine and focuses mostly on Google. If that sounds boring, it isn’t. At it’s core this is a business book that goes [...]
