Here are 100 books that The Alchemy of Finance fans have personally recommended if you like
The Alchemy of Finance.
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My first job after college was at The Wall Street Journal, working evenings as a copyreader. It was thrilling to enter a big-league newsroom, but torture to be confined to putting tiny headlines on even tinier stories. Then at age 23, after a whirlwind staff shuffle, I started writing the paper’s premier stock-market column, “Heard on the Street.” Daylight had arrived. For the next 11 years, I covered finance. I met billionaires and people en route to prison. It wasn’t always easy to tell them apart! My writing career has widened since then but sizing up markets – and the people who rule them – remains an endless fascination.
There have been newer books on Warren Buffett since this 1995 gem, but this one goes the deepest into the mechanisms that have brought Buffett a $124 billion fortune. Plus it’s the best on Buffett’s quirky personality. I’ve known Roger from our days at The Wall Street Journal together, and it was exciting seeing him research this project over a three-year span – even if Buffett never officially helped him. The finished book made me feel I “knew” Buffett as if he were a long-time neighbor.
Since its hardcover publication in August of 1995, Buffett has appeared on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Newsday and Business Week bestseller lists.
Starting from scratch, simply by picking stocks and companies for investment, Warren Buffett amassed one of the epochal fortunes of the twentieth century—an astounding net worth of $10 billion, and counting. His awesome investment record has made him a cult figure popularly known for his seeming contradictions: a billionaire who has a modest lifestyle, a phenomenally successful investor who eschews the revolving-door trading of modern Wall Street,…
My first job after college was at The Wall Street Journal, working evenings as a copyreader. It was thrilling to enter a big-league newsroom, but torture to be confined to putting tiny headlines on even tinier stories. Then at age 23, after a whirlwind staff shuffle, I started writing the paper’s premier stock-market column, “Heard on the Street.” Daylight had arrived. For the next 11 years, I covered finance. I met billionaires and people en route to prison. It wasn’t always easy to tell them apart! My writing career has widened since then but sizing up markets – and the people who rule them – remains an endless fascination.
This is a 1951 Indian novel, but don’t let that deter you. Narayan’s central character is a dreamy village banker who ends up running a bit of a hustle on all of the townspeople. I was braced for this to have an ugly, Bernie Madoff style ending. But that’s not exactly where it goes! I read this on a long flight from San Francisco to Bangalore – and this journey into a culture that was both familiar and surprising made the miles go by very fast.
In the novels of R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), the forefather of modern Indian fiction, human-scale hopes and epiphanies express the promise of a nation as it awakens to its place in the world. In The Financial Expert, a man of many hopes but few resources spends his time under a banyan tree dispensing financial advice to those willing to pay for his knowledge. As charming as it is compassionate, this novel provides an indelible portrait of India in the twentieth century.
I’ve always been interested—a vast understatement to anyone who knows me—in what makes people tick. I’ve focused on analyzing business actors – bankers, lawyers, investors, executives, shareholders, and others. What do they want? Some combination of money, power, or prestige? How does loving to win fit in? How about hating to lose? When is enough (money/power/prestige) enough? What do they think is ok to do to get what they want? What do they think is not ok? Amazingly, as a law professor, I can pursue that interest as part of my job, and – I think and hope – do so in a way that might help lawmakers, regulators, and policymakers do better.
This is a beautifully written story about bankers who rise, and fall spectacularly – into crime, in this case insider trading, with the loss of money, status, and prestige that followed.
What’s particularly fascinating is the historical, ethnic, and sociological backdrop. The book begins with a scene in which Indian-born Rajat Gupta, having come to the US and ascended to the highest echelons of the US business world, was attending a White House dinner for India’s Prime Minister.
The book ends as some people who had been on top are dealing with the aftermath of trials that went very badly for them. The word “Shakespearean” has been used to describe this book, and aptly so.
Just as WASPs, Irish-Catholics and Our Crowd Jews once made the ascent from immigrants to powerbrokers, it is now the Indian-American's turn. Citigroup, PepsiCo and Mastercard are just a handful of the Fortune 500 companies led by a group known as the "Twice Blessed." Yet little is known about how these Indian emigres (and children of emigres) rose through the ranks. Until now...The collapse of the Galeon Group--a hedge fund that managed more than $7 billion in assets--from criminal charges of insider trading was a sensational case that pitted Preet Bharara, himself the son of Indian immigrants, against the best…
My first job after college was at The Wall Street Journal, working evenings as a copyreader. It was thrilling to enter a big-league newsroom, but torture to be confined to putting tiny headlines on even tinier stories. Then at age 23, after a whirlwind staff shuffle, I started writing the paper’s premier stock-market column, “Heard on the Street.” Daylight had arrived. For the next 11 years, I covered finance. I met billionaires and people en route to prison. It wasn’t always easy to tell them apart! My writing career has widened since then but sizing up markets – and the people who rule them – remains an endless fascination.
Who’s the hero in the story? Who’s the villain? I like this book a lot because it’s about a very powerful U.S. institution – mortgage kingpin Fannie Mae – that’s been both. Bob explains how the New Deal era of the 1930s produced a mighty organization that was supposed to make it easier for ordinary people to get mortgages. And then Fannie Mae’s mission drifted, until it became a spectacular part of the 2008 financial meltdown. It’s almost a financial version of Dorian Gray, where virtue turns into sin, and no one notices until it’s too late.
“A lucid and meticulously reported book by one of the Wall Street Journal’s ace reporters” (George Anders, Forbes contributor and author of The Rare Find).
In 1938, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a small agency called Fannie Mae. Intended to make home loans more accessible, the agency was born of the Great Depression and a government desperate to revive housing construction. It was a minor detail of the New Deal, barely recorded by the newspapers of the day.
Over the next seventy years, Fannie Mae evolved into one of the largest financial companies in the world, owned by…
As a wealth advisor for over 37 years, I find many people reach retirement lacking clarity and confidence. Traditional financial advice often focuses on things that are unknowable, uncontrollable, and frankly don’t matter that much. While sound technical investment, estate, and tax planning are critical, the soul’s need for meaning and purpose are as important as sound financial plans. The path to true financial peace may be simpler than you think. These books can help you focus on the fewer, more critical things so that you can thrive in retirement and free yourself from financial media which is not in business to support your vision of a meaningful life.
There are many great books on behavioral investing.
Some are quite difficult to get through with case studies and a deep discussion of the research.
What I love about this book is that Dr. Crosby pulls so much of the research together in a humorous, entertaining, and useful way. Using stories and analogies, you can learn how to be a better investor by managing your behavior.
From the New York Times bestselling author of the book named the best investment book of 2017 comes The Behavioral Investor, an applied look at how psychology ought to inform the art and science of investment management.
In The Behavioral Investor, psychologist and asset manager Dr. Daniel Crosby examines the sociological, neurological and psychological factors that influence our investment decisions and sets forth practical solutions for improving both returns and behavior. Readers will be treated to the most comprehensive examination of investor behavior to date and will leave with concrete solutions for refining decision-making processes, increasing self-awareness and constraining the…
I am the Founder of Stellar Wealth Partners, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst firm and small case manager for investors in the Indian stock market. I am the author of the international best-seller on value investing, The Joys of Compounding. Once a strong foundation is created for a business, owners don’t work for money. Rather, money works for them. As an investor, your money is working for you 24/7. You are becoming wealthier with each passing second, alongside the increasing intrinsic value of your businesses. An investor builds earnings power through a business ownership mindset.
The book outlines an array of “special situations” that may offer very profitable opportunities, i.e. bankruptcies, restructurings, merger securities, and spinoffs, among others. Greenblatt underscores the importance of a set of basic ‘rules’ when delving into the universe of special situations: do your own work, don’t trust anyone, pick your spot and assess the downside, not the upside. The basic premise of the book is that it pays off to search for areas where there is a high probability of finding undervalued equities. You can make a lot of money sticking to the tried-and-true method of investing in and holding good companies for many years. However, if you are a more experienced investor looking for other areas to invest part of your portfolio in, this book will give you several new places to explore.
A comprehensive and practical guide to the stock market from a successful fund manager—filled with case studies, important background information, and all the tools you’ll need to become a stock market genius.
Fund manager Joel Greenblatt has been beating the Dow (with returns of 50 percent a year) for more than a decade. And now, in this highly accessible guide, he’s going to show you how to do it, too. You’re about to discover investment opportunities that portfolio managers, business-school professors, and top investment experts regularly miss—uncharted areas where the individual investor has a huge advantage over the Wall Street…
I am the author of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing and The 3% Signal, among other financial books, and editor of The Kelly Letter. Despite having been ranked by CXO Advisory as one of the best stock-market forecasters, I gave up the practice in favor of price reaction. I realized that nobody knows where stocks are headed, myself included, and set out to find ways to beat the market without forecasting—and succeeded. My readers and I are now much happier and wealthier.
I first encountered Gary Antonacci’s strategy in his paper “Risk Premia Harvesting Through Dual Momentum,” in which he called momentum “the premier market anomaly.” He found that combining absolute and relative momentum delivered optimal results. In this book, he shows how to boost performance with monthly switching among three asset classes in the following decision tree: Did the S&P 500 beat US bonds over the past 12 months? If no, own US bonds. If yes, did the S&P 500 beat global stocks over the past 12 months? If no, own global stocks. If yes, own the S&P 500. Just three funds could power this system: SPY (S&P 500), AGG (US bonds), VEU (global stocks ex US).
The strategy that consistently gets high returns with low risk--because it knows when to adapt
After examining more than two hundred years of data across dozens of markets and asset classes, the conclusion is clear: Momentum continually outperforms. However, most mainstream investors haven't had a way to fully discover and implement the benefits of momentum investing . . . until now! Whether you're an independent investor, investment professional, or money manager, Dual Momentum Investing enables you to consistently profit on major changes in relative strength and market trend.
Based on the award-winning work of Gary Antonacci, an expert in modern…
Almost 20 years ago, I committed to investing all of my money–starting with my cash–in ways that align with my values. It’s been a long and arduous journey, even with the help of financial advisors. When I retired, I took control of my money and realized investing this way does not have to be that hard. Moreover, most women want to invest in their values, but no one is helping them. So, I wrote a book to share the knowledge I’ve gained over 40 years as an investor. Later, I co-founded Invest for Better, a non-profit that puts women into investment clubs to help them become confident, values-aligned investors.
While writing my book, I learned about investment opportunities that I had never heard about before, even though I had decades of experience as an investor and had a series of financial advisors.
A great example is the Self-Directed IRA, a type of retirement account rarely discussed even though it is enormously powerful. While most retirement accounts and 401(k)s offer a small set of bond and stock market funds you can invest in, SDIRAs allow you to invest in almost anything as long as you follow the rules.
This book does a great job of explaining SDIRAs and Solo 401(k)s, how they work, and how you can set one up with some of your retirement assets.
"As so many Americans feel powerless to confront a financial system designed to serve the few, Shuman offers us real choices: tools that align our lives with our values. That's power. I love this highly readable, timely, surprising book." --Frances Moore Lappé, author of Daring Democracy and Diet for a Small Planet
Americans agree on very little these days, but red state conservatives and blue state progressives can agree on one critical point: Wall Street can no longer be trusted. Yet most of us continue to invest our money in the stocks and bonds of Fortune 500 companies, transferring our…
I am the Founder of Stellar Wealth Partners, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst firm and small case manager for investors in the Indian stock market. I am the author of the international best-seller on value investing, The Joys of Compounding. Once a strong foundation is created for a business, owners don’t work for money. Rather, money works for them. As an investor, your money is working for you 24/7. You are becoming wealthier with each passing second, alongside the increasing intrinsic value of your businesses. An investor builds earnings power through a business ownership mindset.
Some people love to make successful investing seem more complicated than it really is. In this anthology of essays and letters written between 2010–20, Terry Smith makes the case for simply buying the best companies in the world. These are businesses that generate large amounts of cash and know what to do with it in the form of sound capital allocation. The result is a powerful compounding of returns for the long term.
This book serves as a good reiteration of the thinking and principles underpinning Smith’s investing approach, including his three-step investment mantra: “Buy good companies. Don’t overpay. Do nothing.” It also highlights the nuances of the process, including why Smith favors return on capital employed (ROCE) and free cash flow (FCF) yield as metrics for assessing companies and why Smith is less enamored of measures such as earnings per share (EPS).
Some people love to make successful investing seem more complicated than it really is. In this anthology of essays and letters written between 2010-20, leading fund manager Terry Smith delights in debunking the many myths of investing - and making the case for simply buying the best companies in the world.
These are businesses that generate serious amounts of cash and know what to do with it. The result is a powerful compounding of returns that is almost impossible to beat. Even better, they aren't going anywhere. Most have survived the Great Depression…
I grew up poor. At 6 years old, I was homeless. My parents had a messy divorce, and I was bounced around a lot as a child. As a result, I grew up with many limiting beliefs; about myself and about money. By age 13, I heard about the stock market and the ability to turn a little into a lot. By the time I graduated high school, I had saved up some money and placed my first trade… I then struggled for more than a decade. After learning the hard way, I finally turned the corner in 2011. My dream is to help others do the same.
William O’Neil’s How To Make Money In Stocks is great for anyone looking to learn how to trade stocks part-time.
It gives you a framework of what actually causes stocks to make the big moves of 300%, 500%, 1,000% or more over the span of a few months to a few years along with a historical perspective of why they move the way they move and a strategy of how to take advantage of it that doesn’t require tuning into the news or being glued to a PC all day.
One of the big things you’ll learn in O’Neil’s book is that modeling success is key. The book starts out with over 100 pages of annotated charts of the biggest winning stocks in history. What you’ll quickly notice is that history repeats itself, over and over again.
Anyone can learn to invest wisely with this bestselling investment system!
Through every type of market, William J. O'Neil's national bestseller, How to MakeMoney in Stocks, has shown over 2 million investors the secrets to building wealth.O'Neil's powerful CAN SLIM (R) Investing System-a proven 7-step process for minimizingrisk and maximizing gains-has influenced generations of investors.
Based on a major study of market winners from 1880 to 2009, this expandededition gives you:
Proven techniques for finding winning stocks before they make big price gains
Tips on picking the best stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs to maximize your gains…
