John Wiley & Sons, 2009, [Equity Investing] Grade 3
The sector analysts at the asset management firm Fisher Investments, run by investment celebrity Ken Fisher, are working through the ten GICS-sectors and presenting them one by one in a number of books. I read this one on the energy sector in parallel with an... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Wiley Publications, 2rd ed 1993, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
The Investor's Quotient, its first edition (1980) written long before the days of Daniel Kahneman winning the Nobel Prize, is at its core about how to master yourself as a means to the endgame of mastering the market. This classic read was way ahead of its time and ages well due to... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
PCA Publications, 3rd ed 2008, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
Despite achieving a cult-like status among a niche group of investors, I would dare to say that Charles Munger is one of the most underrated investors of our age, and a true original thinker. Warren Buffett has been the embodiment of Berkshire Hathaway´s success, but Munger has in many ways supplied... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2001, [Equity Investing] Grade 5
Ben Graham taught value investing with David Dodd at Columbia, starting in 1928. Since then, Columbia has been the academic center for value investing. Graham and his disciples have been extremely successful, mainly because they used Graham’s investment concepts. But as... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Basic Books, 2004, [Finance] Grade 5
Fractals. This seems to have been Benoit Mandelbrot’s premier professional passion in life. A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.” While fractals are... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Penguin Books, 2005, [Business] Grade 5
We all admire Michael Porter for his wisdom regarding strategy. But how do you use his recommendations in real life? Especially if you are an outsider, you need a toolbox that is easier to use and maybe more focused. As an investor, I use the concepts in this book as... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2011, [Finance] Grade 3
This is as far as I know a unique book. It’s in essence a number of check lists covering most aspects of the work description of a sell side equity analyst. The book aims to cater to both the buy side analyst and the sell side analyst. In reality it is the later who is in focus. This is no... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, first edition 1923, [Equity Investing] Grade 5
With surprisingly few exceptions those who have achieved real success on the stock market come from one out of two camps. The first one is value investors with a time horizon of 2 to 5 years and the other is momentum investors with a time horizon of 3 to 18 months. Few in... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2007, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
James Montier, top ranked investment strategist at - in turn - Dresdner Kleinwort, Société Générale and GMO, is probably the most important apostle of behavioural finance there is and as such, should be mentioned right beside names such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler or Robert Shiller. For many investment professionals... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, First edition 1987, [Finance] Grade 5
This book is by many famous traders quoted as the revelation that changed how they view markets. Not that the author needs the validation of others. “Four hundred seventy-three million to one. Those are the odds against George Soros compiling the investment record he did […]” as Paul Tudor Jones II states in... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Harper Business, 1991, [Equity Investing] Grade 5
Everybody knows about Warren Buffett, and Buffett is undoubtedly the most successful value investor of the last 50 years. However, Seth Klarman at Baupost is probably the most prominent value investor of the last 25 years. Baupost was set up in 1982 and has since averaged... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Columbia University Press, 2006, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
As a leading thinker on investments Michael Mauboussin, strategist at Legg Mason and formerly at Credit Suisse First Boston, has through his widely read writings influenced how equities are viewed today. This book is an inspiring tour on a number of topics related to investment philosophy and... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Dover Publications, First edition 1895, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
There are a number of books that portray financial bubbles and crowd behaviour. This from 1895 is the best one even if it doesn’t specifically touch on the financial markets. The Crowd by the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon covers a number of topics such as how individuals... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Doubleday, 2004, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 5
The mob is often seen to lack both a sense of reasonable proportion and an ability to balance multiple inputs. Those who have lived through the recent financial crisis would probably sign off on a similar view of how collectives function. Yet, the top rated analyst has a curious difficulty in beating the collective when it comes to... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, [Equity Investing] Grade 4
Economist Andrew Smithers is the founder of Smithers & Co that gives advice on asset allocation to many of the largest asset managers globally. Smithers real claim to fame is however as the co-author of the extremely well timed book Valuing Wall Street. In this book he, right at... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2000, [Equity Investing] Grade 5
Two books came out early 2000, right at the peak of the TMT-bubble, and in combination they changed the way I viewed the equity market. The first one was Irrational Exuberance by Professor Robert Shiller and the second was Valuing Wall Street by Smithers & Wright. Not only did they... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Harvard Business Press, 2008, [Finance] Grade 3
Does private equity owned companies have a superior management model than public owned companies? The writers of this book certainly like to think so. Israeli born strategy expert Orit Gadiesh is the chairwoman of the management consulting firm Bain & Company and Hugh MacArthur is the leader of the same firms’ - huge - global private equity practice. In this short book they describe the... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2011, [Finance] Grade 5
This is a magnificent book. It’s also absolutely massive, 500+ pages totally stuffed with information. The recent recruit to AQR, Antti Ilmanen, with a long experience from the Finish central bank, Salomon Brothers FX-department and the hedge fund Brevan Howard is a sponge concerning financial knowledge. There is... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2011, [Finance] Grade 4
One of the holy grails of investing would be to spot financial bubbles before they burst. Hedge fund manager Vikram Mansharamani who teaches a class at Yale called Financial Booms and Busts, has written a book on this very subject. With the notion that while asset markets... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2009, [Equity Investing] Grade 3
The author Jeff Matthews, hedge fund manager at Ram Partners and blogger, is also one of the characters in the text as it almost has the form of a diary. The main character is not Matthews however, it’s not even Warren Buffett. The spotlight instead falls on... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
