January 24, 2015 Book Reviews
Last year I started to invest my money into equities. Before that I was always interested in investing money, but I didn’t have enough knowledge, tools and money, so my investments were limited to timely deposits in Ukraine and later to mutual funds in Austria.
I started to buy equities thanks to the interview for the developer role I had in local financial startup. So in order to better understand their business I opened an account with a broker bank. (Btw, I even had gambling accounts when I worked for a betting company.) My current equities portfolio is up 7% since September 2014 when I started to invest into equities. Of course I’m in a good position since it is still bull market we are in. Nevertheless there is a lot of danger in this overheated environment and way too many pitfalls. So knowledge, discipline and patience are key.
As for the knowledge there are plenty of books written on investing. A lot of them are just mutually contradicting and more often than not useless. But there are books that were tested by time and deserve their mention in “best” lists. No wonder top of most of those lists is “The intelligent Investor”. I’m reading it at the moment and I can tell that it is by far the most far reaching book of all other ones I’ve read on investing. But to be honest, I’ve only read very few and I didn’t pay to much attention to selection of books, so I was reading some nonsense about doomsday and gold rush. Therefore I decided to come up with some good list for this year, since I anyway planned to read at least 13 books on investing.
I compiled this list in very simple way by searching the web for lists of recommended books and then selecting only those that appear most frequently in those lists. I scanned maybe 20 lists. The list below is like unsorted merge of other lists. I’m planning to have reviews for each of these books and then in the end of the year to have a list with overview and maybe my rating. So if I come up with rating list, it will also include other books I’ve already read on investing that didn’t make it into this list.
The List
- “The intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham
- “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” by Burton G. Malkiel
- “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “One Way Up On Wall Street” by Peter Lynch
- “Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits” by Philip A. Fisher
- “Winning on Wall Street” by Martin Zweig
- “The Richest man in babylon” by George S. Clason
- “Manias, Panics and Crashes” by Charles P. Kindleberger
- “The Four Pillars of Investing” by William J. Bernstein
- “Irrational Exuberance” by Prof Robert J. Shiller
- “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis
- “The Warren Buffet Way” by Robert G. Hagstrom
- “Security Analysis” by Benjamin Graham
Other books
Some other books I consider to read or I might read instead of one or few above
- “Beating the Street” by Peter Lynch
- “The tragedy of the EU” by George Soros
- “Stress test” by Timothy Geithner
- “The Clash of the Cultures” by John C. Bogle
- “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas J. Stanley
- “The Wealthy Barber” by David Chilton
- “A Short History of Financial Euphoria” by John Kenneth Galbraith
- “Against the Gods” by Peter L. Bernstein
- “The Essays of Warren Buffet” by Warren E. Buffett
- “Common Sense on Mutual Funds” by John C. Bogle
If you are total beginner I think it is wise to start with smaller books like “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” or “The Richest man in Babylon”.
I think it is very important to have the knowledge in a field you want to operate in, being it software development or investing or whatever. So good luck both to you and myself.
codemore code
~~~~