Gyroscopic Investing

Other than HB's books, would anyone like to start a thread about their favorite finance and investing books (can be lay, academic, and professional recommendations)?  Any chance to make this a sticky thread?

Here are the two that I usually recommend for folks that have a new interest in investing:

1.  The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns - John Bogle.

2.  A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Tenth Edition) - Burton G. Malkiel.

Great website to compare book prices: http://www.findbookprices.com/

The Money Game and Supermoney by "Adam Smith" are outstanding.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds is excellent.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is also very good.

Investing is about psychology (yours and the crowd's) much than it is about numbers and data.

Agree and good suggestions MT.  I have read all of them and have the last two. 

The (mis)Behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot is probably my favorite book about markets. He just has a totally unique way of analyzing their return characteristics. It's a shame that he died recently because he was doing a lot of cutting edge work.

Any recommendations in the field of "Personal Finances"?

i found "the millionaire next door" to be interesting, i don't recall any specific investment advice (and probably wouldn't take it if had any) but i thought the mindset it presented toward personal finance and becoming wealthy to be well thought out..

I've read a lot of financial books and it is surprising how few really hold up over time, especially tactics-oriented ones.  As it is, I'm stumped to think of any to recommend other than these two:

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market

Automatic Wealth for Grads -- And Anyone Else Just Starting Out

l82start wrote: i found "the millionaire next door" to be interesting, i don't recall any specific investment advice (and probably wouldn't take it if had any) but i thought the mindset it presented toward personal finance and becoming wealthy to be well thought out..

A good followup to that is Seven Years to Seven Figures: The Fast-Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire, which despite the title, is actually full of eight stories and interviews of ordinary people that did it in various ways and how they did it.

escafandro wrote:

Any recommendations in the field of "Personal Finances"?

Your Money Ratios by Charles Farrell

No-Nonsense Finance by E F Moody (he also has a website filled with personal finance info and his abrasive style...)

I've enjoyed just about every investing book by Jack Bogle, especially Common Sense on Mutual Funds. As a beginning investor, I picked up a lot of both knowledge and wisdom from that book.

melveyr wrote: The (mis)Behavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot is probably my favorite book about markets. He just has a totally unique way of analyzing their return characteristics. It's a shame that he died recently because he was doing a lot of cutting edge work.

+1. It's one of my favorites as well.

l82start wrote: i found "the millionaire next door" to be interesting, i don't recall any specific investment advice (and probably wouldn't take it if had any) [. . .]

Most of the "advice" throughout that book was only implied, based on the overlapping characteristics of the various millionaires they studied. For example, the overall implication was that if you want to be what Stanley and Danko call a "Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth (PAW)," you have to save much more than you spend. Some of the millionaires they studied had high enough incomes that they still enjoyed very comfortable (sometimes even luxurious) lifestyles--just not as luxurious as they could have afforded, since they were saving so much of their income.

Lowell Miller's "The Single Best Investment: Creating Wealth with Dividend Growth" (borrow from a library, good introduction but he'd rather you let him manage your money so the book isn't a long term reference as much as an introduction)

The missing part of Miller's book is covered by David van Knapp's "Best Dividend Stocks for yyyy"  (updated yearly) ebook:  http://www.sensiblestocks.com/dividendt ... ption.html


For more "how to think" instead of "what to think" (good for lifetime reference)...

Ben Graham's "The Intelligent Investor"

Jeremy Siegel's "Stocks for the Long Run"


And more general/macro (probably read from the library)...

Robert Schiller's "Irrational Exuberance"

Reinhart & Rogoff's "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly"

"Your Money and Your Brain" by Jason Zweig. It is interesting, funny, and useful.

"The Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. The whole book is worth reading but Chapter 11 lays out investing. The graph on page 351 of the hard cover edition is especially instructive.

The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Tobias - for people who will only read one book
The Permanent Portfolio by Rowland and Lawson - had to
Early Retirement Extreme by Fisker
Your Money or Your Life by Robin et al.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Malkiel
Asset Allocation by Gibson
The Intelligent Asset Allocator by Bernstein
The Intelligent Investor by Graham
Common Sense on Mutual Funds by Bogle

KevinW wrote: Your Money or Your Life by Robin et al.

I wouldn't follow the investment advice in that book.  LOL!

Silly me, I want to recommend this book too:

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Bernstein.

Thanks for the posts.  I have ordered several of the books posted.

Against the Gods is amazing.

Also, would add Work Less, Live More by Robert Clyatt.  Sort of a thinking person's version of Your Money or Your Life.

Just finished Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein.  An excellent book.  Thanks for the recommendation.  Next up is The Misbehavior of Markets.

I just finished The Money Game.  It was a blast and not at all what I was expecting.  It's hard to believe it was published in 1969.  I would christen it cannonical along with The Human Zoo.

MachineGhost wrote: I just finished The Money Game.  It was a blast and not at all what I was expecting.  It's hard to believe it was published in 1969.  I would christen it cannonical along with The Human Zoo.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.  Really well-written (and funny), don't you think?

MediumTex wrote: I'm glad you enjoyed it.  Really well-written (and funny), don't you think?

It was a hoot!  Any theories on who "Adam Smith" really was?  It had to be an open secret for a fair bit of people.

MachineGhost wrote:

MediumTex wrote: I'm glad you enjoyed it.  Really well-written (and funny), don't you think?

It was a hoot!  Any theories on who "Adam Smith" really was?  It had to be an open secret for a fair bit of people.

It's well known.  I don't recall right now, but it's easy to find out.

Off the top of my head, the ones that I've read which stand out in my mind are:

The Intelligent Investor

Winning the Loser's Game

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

The Automatic Millionaire (for novices, as long as you leave out his advice on real estate)

Investing for Dummies (for novices)

... and of course, The Permanent Portfolio.

I'm reading The Bond Book by Annette Thau right now.  For newbies like me, it's an excellent introduction to bonds/cash, as well as general concepts about mutual funds and ETFs.  I found it at the library, and it's much better written than a competing bond book I picked up from the library.  Be sure to get the third edition, written after the 2008 crash.

Just finished Mandelbrot's Misbehavior of Markets.  An interesting perspective, but wonder if "fractals" will stand up to the test of time anymore than the financial theories, e.g., Black-Scholes, that he finds to be inaccurate.

MachineGhost wrote:

l82start wrote: i found "the millionaire next door" to be interesting, i don't recall any specific investment advice (and probably wouldn't take it if had any) but i thought the mindset it presented toward personal finance and becoming wealthy to be well thought out..

A good followup to that is Seven Years to Seven Figures: The Fast-Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire, which despite the title, is actually full of eight stories and interviews of ordinary people that did it in various ways and how they did it.

I third the recommendation of "the millionaire next door". I don't remember any investment advice either but I remember that if you want to figure which of your neighbors is the millionaire it's probably not the one with the Lexus or Mercedes in the driveway but the one who drives the same car year after year.

I will also put the Seven Years book on my reading list since it's been more than 7 years since I read the other book and I'm not quite there yet.