The best books to read if you want to retire with millions in the stock market

The term “irrational exuberance” which forms the title of this book, entered the public lexicon in 1996, days after the book’s author, Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, gave a presentation about stock market bubbles to the Federal Reserve. Alan Greenspan, who was Fed chair at the time, used the term in a public speech; and the rest is history. The book Irrational Exuberance provides an account of how psychological forces generate asset pricing bubbles. The book was published during the dotcom bubble, and proved to be prophetic in the way it anticipated the subsequent housing pricing bubble which preceded the global financial crisis and associated great recession. Readers will find amazing insights in this book, especially about the way that history repeats itself when it comes to asset pricing bubbles.

It’s time for some economics. I am embarrassed to say that following the Global Financial Crisis my profession has fallen into acute disarray, its models have proved to be utterly inadequate. Radical Uncertainty in the landmark book explains why this was the case. Economists had reduced all unknowns to quantifiable probabilities, which could then be inserted into models and managed by diversification and insurance. Unfortunately, the world is not like that: with disturbing frequency, people, businesses, and societies are hit by ‘unknown unknowns’ like COVID. Managing uncertainty requires an approach quite alien to economics, its priorities being the resilience of strategies such as built-in redundancy, and rapid recovery that comes from decentralised experiments around a common purpose. Kay was once Britain’s boy-wonder of mathematical economics; King was once a top professor of finance who became the Governor of the Bank of England. Heroically, they have recanted the ideas they once taught. Fortunately for the lay reader, they know how to write.

A few years ago, I had just come off stage after delivering a keynote and was grabbing my luggage to rush to the airport to catch my flight. Well, I missed my flight, and it was worth it. The moment I heard the speaker after me, I was riveted. I’d never heard of her, but I had to stay. I had to listen. I had to meet her backstage in the greenroom. The speaker? Brené Brown. 

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly perfectly defines the shift we have seen in recent generations. Where vulnerability was once perceived as weakness, Brown portrays how she and others have transformed their own shame and guilt into strength. Daring Greatly reaffirms my own experience of stepping into discomfort and owning my story. By embracing fear, discomfort, and vulnerability, I discovered how self-acceptance can lead to helping others do the same.