Investing Books

Essential Book Reads

• DK's How Money Works - easy to understand bite-sized infographics on financial concepts of asset allocation, debt, bonds, CAPM, etc. Good book to start if you don't know a lot of about how money makes the world go around.

• The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks - gives you nuggets of wisdom about how to think about risk management and investing defensively.  The book brings together best of his memos and some of his timeless observations from decades past hold more than ever today. More palatable and easier to digest than Intelligent Investor.

• Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham - A seminal 1949 book which inspired value investors like Graham's most famous student Warren Buffet.  The updated audiobook is available through most public libraries via Hoopla. His key concepts of "margin of safety" and "dollar cost averaging" pretty much dictates most investment decisions I make.  

• Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle - Even if you have bought into the whole passive index fund as the best strategy, it's still good to hear the godfather of index investing advocate why the cheapest passive index fund has beaten most actively managed funds for decades.  

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - interesting read for all humans with a brain. Second section about our internal biases is most relevant for investing- anchoring, loss aversion, overconfidence etc...

Mixed But Worth Mentioning

• Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street - If you are a stock picker, Lynch lays out a lot of common sense factors.
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - useful in thinking about role of luck from outcome.  However, the author has loaded this book with an excess of self-indulgent musings.

More Technical Titles

• Misbehavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot - interesting read on the volatility present in all markets across time but he also flatly says patterns are "fool's gold".
• Second Leg Down - advanced hedging strategies