Here are 66 books that The Four Pillars of Investing fans have personally recommended if you like
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In the early 2000s, I noticed that lots of good American jobs were being lost to China. I was taught in college economics that trade was always win-win and that the government should stay out of the economy. I started reading the literature and found a number of flaws with these free trade and extreme free-market doctrines. The flaws were there in plain sight, but US trade economists, with vanishingly few exceptions, were ignoring them. Not only were the costs to our economy and our workers enormous, but the frustration of American workers with 30 years of failed promises by both parties has made our politics angrier and more divisive.
This book makes the novel and, to me, fascinating case that the economy is an evolutionary system that is constantly changing, implying that the static equilibria of conventional trade models are not usefully predictive. It also made it clear to me, from a different perspective, that the industries in which a country succeeds are path-dependent.
If you are a mosquito, the next evolutionary mutation will not produce an elephant. Likewise, it is much easier to design and manufacture 3 nanometer-scale chips if you have already designed and manufactured 5 nanometer-scale chips. This drove home to me how important retaining the key industries of today is for our long-term prosperity.
Over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one. How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a "complex adaptive system" in…
Wealth Odyssey is a summary work based on a 12-hour adult education course I taught for 10 years. It’s important to me to educate people through my 29 years in the profession (1994-2023), my focus has always been on helping people first understand that retirement means you’re wealthy enough not to work anymore – working is optional. You don’t need to be rich. Wealth is scalable for any income level and comes from foundation income and investments to supplement that foundation to support your desired lifestyle’s Standard of Individual Living (SOIL) for as long as you live. Your focus should be on your plan and apply a few concepts grounded in well researched evidence.
When people think of financial planning, their first thought is investing. Their second thought is retirement.
Kaplans explain risk succinctly: “Everything is possible, yet only one thing happens.” People understand risk but don’t really understand how to apply it rationally to investing (market risks) or to retirement (longevity risk).
But first, having an understanding of what risk is and isn’t, and where it comes from is important before you can apply it to what fuels your plans – markets and longevity.
This book helped me formulate the basic planning concepts I use in my book since personal finance is all about taking risks – as are any other decisions and actions you take in life.
A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness
Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable—to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract…
Wealth Odyssey is a summary work based on a 12-hour adult education course I taught for 10 years. It’s important to me to educate people through my 29 years in the profession (1994-2023), my focus has always been on helping people first understand that retirement means you’re wealthy enough not to work anymore – working is optional. You don’t need to be rich. Wealth is scalable for any income level and comes from foundation income and investments to supplement that foundation to support your desired lifestyle’s Standard of Individual Living (SOIL) for as long as you live. Your focus should be on your plan and apply a few concepts grounded in well researched evidence.
Personal financial planning has to include investing. With investing comes risk. There are many books on investing. There are few on how to approach investing. Although a short book, it succinctly covers how to think about stock returns, modern financial theory, building a portfolio with risk also in mind, and applying Monte Carlo.
This book combines risk with returns so that you can better target risk to your financial plans. Having a long term, which means the rest of your life, view helps you understand everything has cycles. Using cycles of different investments in a portfolio construct, rather than viewing each investment separately, helps mute cyclical effects on your plans.
I always refer to the fundamentals discussed in this book when I begin to second guess my own plans when markets “misbehave” as they always do. It reaffirms how the application of modern financial theory has worked in the past…
In their expanded and updated 2018 edition of “Reducing the Risk of Black Swans: Using the Science of Investing to Capture Returns with Less Volatility,” Larry Swedroe, author of the bestselling "The Only Guide" series of investment books, and Kevin Grogan, co-author of "The Only Guide You'll Ever Need for the Right Financial Plan," revisit what it takes to build more efficient portfolios in today’s evolving financial landscape.
Designed specifically for those seeking to enrich their technical knowledge of recent advancements in the world of evidence-based investing, the revised second edition reexamines and enhances Swedroe and Grogan’s roadmap to an…
Wealth Odyssey is a summary work based on a 12-hour adult education course I taught for 10 years. It’s important to me to educate people through my 29 years in the profession (1994-2023), my focus has always been on helping people first understand that retirement means you’re wealthy enough not to work anymore – working is optional. You don’t need to be rich. Wealth is scalable for any income level and comes from foundation income and investments to supplement that foundation to support your desired lifestyle’s Standard of Individual Living (SOIL) for as long as you live. Your focus should be on your plan and apply a few concepts grounded in well researched evidence.
Everyone makes mental shortcuts and also have biases. How can we learn to recognize errors in thinking when it comes to our money? How can we make better choices when it comes to saving or spending? Are we normal or irrational?
Behavioral finance began in the 1970s and I found Statman’s discussion fascinating on almost every page. He sums up these biases when applied to our financial choices as well as to the markets.
Normal people have wants and emotions. This contrasts with many books about how people are irrational. Indeed, we are more normal than irrational once we understand that poor choices are actually normal. Statman describes how to make better choices by recognizing choice and biases we have.
These concepts are important if you want to grow your wealth without making someone else wealthy through your spending habits.
Finance for Normal People teaches behavioral finance to people like you and me - normal people, neither rational nor irrational. We are consumers, savers, investors, and managers - corporate managers, money managers, financial advisers, and all other financial professionals.
The book guides us to know our wants - including hope for riches, protection from poverty, caring for family, sincere social responsibility and high social status. It teaches financial facts and human behavior, including making cognitive and emotional shortcuts and avoiding cognitive and emotional errors such as overconfidence, hindsight, exaggerated fear, and unrealistic hope. And it guides us to banish ignorance,…
I’m a money manager for high-net-worth individuals. During my Wall Street years, I was ranked number one in my category in the Institutional Investor All America Research Survey for nine consecutive years. The CFA Society New York presented me its Ben Graham Award in 2017. I’ve served as a governor of the CFA Institute and consultant to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. My writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the Financial Times, and various scholarly journals. I live in New York City with my wife, musicologist Elaine Sisman. We have two children and five grandchildren.
Forget bromides such as buying a stock because your experience with the company’s product has been good. The hugely successful money manager Howard Marks makes the essential point that the goal is not to find good companies but to make good purchases. “It’s not what you buy,” he says, “it’s what you pay for it.” Investors who are interested in good outcomes rather than thrills will find many more sound principles in this book.
"This is that rarity, a useful book."--Warren Buffett Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor. Informed by a lifetime of experience and study,…
Investing in the share market appears to be a bewildering, constantly shifting, extremely noisy, and busy world – one best left to the experts. Fortunes can be made but, equally, fortunes can be lost – with devastating results for those on the receiving end. And yet there are a few, simple, timeless principles to investing in the market successfully – and, ironically, those principles – known collectively as index or passive investing – will be more successful than all the noisy, busy stuff put out by the industry. In writing our book, this is what we would like as many people as possible to know. It’s not about being smart.
This is a slim, to-the-point, easily understood book based on the same principles as the well-known book on writing, The Elements of Style. With its five chapters, it is the opposite of the highly complex, bewildering, we-know-more-than-you communication put out on a daily basis by the investment industry. Its wisdom is timeless. It’s all that a first-time investor needs to know.
Seize control of your financial future with rock-solid advice from two of the world's leading investment experts
Investors today are bombarded with conflicting advice about how to handle the increasingly volatile stock market. From pronouncements of the "death of diversification" to the supposed virtues of crypto, investors can be forgiven for being thoroughly confused.
It's time to return to the basics. In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor, investment legends Burton G. Malkiel and Charles D. Ellis deliver straightforward, digestible lessons in the investment rules and principles you need to follow to…
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.
Ready to roll up your sleeves? This book takes work but is worth the mental energy. It’s a departure from most rules-based material in that it advocates applying objective odds when making subjective judgments. I prefer an all-algorithmic approach, but tip my hat to this hybrid strategy—far preferable to mainstream financial-media dart-tossing. Established patterns exist and are exploitable. Big-picture tactics trump lucky breaks. How much better the world would be if more people understood that bonds are less volatile than stocks. This book confirms that tweaking essential portfolio management factors to eke out a slight advantage runs circles around the casino mindset.
Praise for Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management
"A must-have reference for any equity portfolio manager or MBA student, this book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of equity portfolio management, from factor models to tax management."ERIC ROSENFELD, Principal & Co-founder of JWM Partners
"This is an ambitious book that both develops the broad range of artillery employed in quantitative equity investment management and provides the reader with a host of relevant practical examples. The book excels in melding theory with practice."STEPHEN A. ROSS, Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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 liked this book enough to write a blurb for it, as follows: “Any plan that would have led investors to Amazon, Apple, and Google is fine by me—and this one would have. Edward Ryan has created a systematic framework for owning what you know, a tried-and-true tactic.” No less a luminary than Peter Lynch endorses the idea, and in this book you’ll learn five steps to systematize it: list your life activities, extract stock ideas from them, rank those stocks, invest, and manage the portfolio. The second step is the most interesting to me; it’s where you consider which products and services in your life are most likely to keep a stock moving higher.
Professional investors on Wall Street have the best education, the deepest knowledge of company accounts, the latest technology, and teams of analysts at their disposal to help them identify the best stock investments. That is their edge. As a part-time, individual investor, you cannot compete on their turf.
What can you do? This is where The World's Simplest Stock Picking Strategy comes in.
As you go about your life, there are companies you interact with regularly as a consumer. Some companies will stand out to you as having remarkable products or services, which you use…
The stock market has been a passion of mine for over 15 years. These books have helped me learn how to spot trends and manage my risk while trading in stocks and cryptocurrencies through bull and bear markets.
Mark Minervini is undoubtedly one of the greatest traders to ever live. This book is an absolute gem, building on what O’Neil wrote in his book. Minervini has gotten his trading down to absolute precision, from when to buy, when to sell, and how to screen for stocks. It’s all in here. A must-read for anyone looking to learn about trading.
"Minervini has run circles around most PhDs tryingto design systems to beat the market." -- JACK SCHWAGER, bestselling author of Stock Market Wizards
"Mark's book has to be on every investor's bookshelf. It is about the most comprehensive work I have ever read on investing in growth stocks." -- DAVID RYAN, three-time U.S. Investing Champion
"[Minervini is] one of the most highly respected independent traders of our generation. His experience and past history of savvy market calls is legendary." -- CHARLES KIRK, The Kirk Report
"One of Wall Street's most remarkable success stories." -- BEN POWER, Your Trading Edge
We first met about 10 years ago at Sheffield Hallam University, bonding as work colleagues over a love of enabling students to understand wealth management and finance in a way that we hoped they would find interesting and accessible. The books we chose mix our love of storytelling and making finance accessible by using real-world experiences. They do this in a unique way, challenging the reader to think about their understanding and perspective, something we try to do every day. It has been lovely to reread these books before writing the reviews, reminding us of what makes us tick. We hope they help you to find your tick too.
We enjoyed this book for its innovative approach, which involves a very specific and defined focus, and its appropriateness for a broad spectrum of investors. The method empowers investors to utilise selected criteria in their investment choices to create a successful investment strategy. It provides “tried and tested” principles for “stock pickers,” focusing on the author’s growth investing specialism.
The book is written in a style that is easy to digest but makes some complex investment methods seem obvious, just what I like in books. It is concise but each chapter allows the reader to reflect on their understanding. This represents a good investment for an investor looking to broaden their knowledge and develop their own investment approach.
Jim Slater's classic text brought back into print Jim Slater makes available to the investor - whether the owner of only a few shares or an experienced investment manager with a large portfolio - the secrets of his success. Central to his strategy is "The Zulu Principle", the benefits of homing in on a relatively narrow area. Deftly blending anecdote and analysis, Jim Slater gives valuable selective criteria for buying dynamic growth shares, turnarounds, cyclicals, shells and leading shares. He also covers many other vitally relevant aspects of investment such as creative accounting, portfolio management, overseas markets and the investor's…
