We’re halfway through the year, so this is another quarterly update on my attempt to read more books this year.
Mostly, this is for my own accountability but if you see something interesting, even better. You can find the last quarter’s reading list here.
These are the books I’ve read over the last quarter.
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini takes a deep dive into all the ways we’re easily manipulated. It’s a dense read on the many tactics used by salespeople to get us to say yes. I set it down a couple times, read another book, before finally finishing it.
- The Art of Investing – John Hume wrote this in 1888. Yes, it’s an old book but it’s a short read and Hume covers many of the typical mistakes investors made back then and still make today. Hume spends the last chapter on the dangers of speculation by painting Wall Street as a monstrous devilfish.
- The Art of Speculation – Another old book. Philip Carret wrote this book two years before the 1929 Crash. The book offers a nice mix of investing and history lessons.
- What Works on Wall Street – This is the bible for quant strategies by Jim O’Shaughnessy. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re into that kind of thing, the book is exhaustive.
- Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments – I’m surprised this idea hasn’t been done before. Michael Batnick covers some of the biggest mistakes made by big-name investors like Graham, Buffett, Druckenmiller, Munger and more. Broader lesson: even great investors have their version of kryptonite. We spend an inordinate amount of time studying their successes. Most investors are probably better off studying their mistakes.
- The Little Book of Behavioral Investing – Part of the Little Book series, James Montier covers the many bad choices investors inflict on themselves that lead to unnecessary underperformance. And he offers ways to protect us from ourselves.
- Heretics of Dune – The fifth book in the Dune series. A good read overall. An improvement over the fourth book.
- Chapterhouse: Dune – The sixth and final book in the original series. Good so far, still reading it (really, I’m plowing through it for the sake of completeness).
If none of those books catch your eye, here are a few more lists that might help fill out your summer reading.
- J.P. Morgan Reading List 2018
- 100 Most-Loved Books: The Great American Read
- 12 Books Every Aspiring Leader Should Read
- Marc Andreessen’s Recent Reads (tweet thread from yesterday)
Last Call
- The Ghost of Tech Stocks Past – The Irrelevant Investor
- Fearless – MicroCapClub
- Immeasurably Important – M. Housel
- After the Fall: Ten Years After the Crash – London Review of Books
- If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? – HBR
- Try to Resist Misinterpreting the Marshmallow Test – Behavioral Scientist
- How to Get Away with Financial Fraud – Guardian
- A History of Modern Capitalism from the Perspective of the Straw – Atlantic
- Letter From a Birmingham Museum – Epsilon Theory
- The Fallacy of Obviousness – Aeon
- Juan Pablo Villarino on Travel and Trust (podcast) – Conversations with Tyler
- Learn How Rich You Could Have Been With Hindsight Financial (video) – Conan