These Are Still Worth Reading
Felix shot me a note not long ago asking if I had to train myself in investing today, what books would I read? This, of course, revealed Felix as a relatively recent reader since I touched on this topic way back in season one. But since most of you are relatively recent readers (building an audience is a slow burn) and since Felix asked, I thought I’d revisit it.
First, a point about investing. For me, successful investing requires taking insufficient information and synthesizing it with what you know about the world to make bets on people that are more likely than not to increase in value at a rate that exceeds what you’d achieve by getting out of bed everyday and going through the motions. If you agree, then investing methodologies aren’t necessarily what matters most to doing it (though you do need to be numerate and know enough about financing and accounting to be dangerous), but rather knowledge and understanding of how both you and others are wired and the implications of that for how the world works. This is why my book recommendations for aspiring investors are pretty unconventional. They are: The Classic Guide to Better Writing by Rudolf Flesch, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, and A Sick Day for Amos McGee (a children’s book!) by Philip C. Stead.
A good question is why are these three odd books my recommendations? The reason is that together they can help you understand and communicate well in stressful situations with incomplete information while remaining kind, caring, and curious. And there you have it. That’s investing.
Yet another aspect to successful investing is that you have to be constantly updating your priors (shoutout Thomas Bayes). To that end, I also recommend investors read a lot of contemporaneous stuff every day. These picks include X nee Twitter, Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, The Wall Street Journal, newspapers from different foreign cities, recent SEC enforcement actions, and newly published papers in the field of decision science.
Yet if you twist my arm, you can also get me to recommend some canonical investing and business books. None of these are likely anything you haven’t already heard of, but if you know someone who hasn’t read them and wants to get into this field, they always make great gifts. They are (in no particular order):
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger and edited by Peter Kaufman
Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders by Warren Buffett
The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow
The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen
Business Adventures by John Brooks
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
The Match King by Frank Partnoy
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Expectations Investing by Michael Mauboussin
Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What’d I miss?
-Tim
