“…The successful macro-investor must be some magical mixture of an acute analyst, an investment scholar, a listener, a historian, a river boat gambler, and be a voracious reader – reading is crucial…” ~ Barton Biggs

“…Try to acquire every bit of fundamental information available. Read extensively…” ~ Amos Hostetter



Trading in the real world markets (especially macro-trading) requires multi-disciplinary principles. That’s why I believe the first rule in becoming a successful speculator is to be an avid reader across various topics.

Such as: financial history, investing strategies, valuation, economic philosophy, psychology, risk and probabilities, complex systems, politics, biology/ecology, and even physics.

Having a large ‘mental toolbox’ full of practical tools, knowledge, and principles you can pull from is extremely important. This is where your edge comes from (aka competitive advantage).

Over the years since I began trading – I’ve read hundreds of books across multiple subjects. And I still try to read at least one book a week (25-50 pages an evening).

In fact, Charlie Munger – Warren Buffet’s smarter half – has said he reads upwards of 500-800 quality pages per day, and believes this has helped him most with his career.

I 100% agree with him.

I love sitting up until 3 a.m., reading and writing down notes while listening to jazz-and-house music.

It’s my favorite way to study, reflect and prepare for a trade. . .





So what do I look for in a book? I believe that a good book should be – at least for trading – practical.

Most books are just noise – full of useless theories, redundancy, and opinions that won’t do anything for the reader in the long-term.

Thus – as a speculator – I want books with original ideas and sound principles that I can add to my ‘mental toolbox’.

So after thinking it over a long while – I put together a list of books that have impacted my thinking, trading strategies, and gave me the tools I needed to have an edge in the market.

I believe all these books are worth reading and will give you the great multi-disciplinary insight and practical use needed to become a better speculator.



Adem Tumerkan,

Editor

*Updated with new books June 12, 2019

Behavioral Finance and Psychology:

Thinking, Fast and Slow – by Daniel Khaneman

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don’t – by Nate Silver

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – by Gustave Le Bon

The Undoing Project – by Michael Lewis

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics – By Richard Thaler

What I learned Losing a Million Dollars – by Jim Paul

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing – by Michael J. Mauboussin

Behavioral Investing: A Practitioners Guide to Applying Behavioral Finance – by James Montier

A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility – by Nicola Gennaioli

Irrational Exuberance – by Robert J. Shiller

The Tipping Point: How Little Thing Can Make a Big Difference – by Malcolm Gladwell

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism – by George A. Akerlof

Randomness, Risk, Dealing with the Unpredictable :

The Black Swan – by Nassim Taleb

Fooled By Randomness – by Nassim Taleb

Antifragile – by Nassim Taleb

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives – by Leonard Mlodinow

Risk Savvy – by Gerd Gigerenzer

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

Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge in an Uncertain World – by Ian Bremmer

War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics – by Jeffrey A. Friedman

Financial History (Plus the History of Booms and Busts):

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems – by Didier Sornette

Big Debt Crises (Three Vol. Set) – by Ray Dalio

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History – by David Hacket Fischer

Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (7 th Edition) – by Charles P. Kindleberger

Edition) – by Charles P. Kindleberger The Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation – by Edward Chancellor

BULL: A History of Boom and Busts – by Maggie Mahar

American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold – by Sebastian Edwards

CRASHED: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World – by Adam Tooze

A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation – by Scott Nation

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War – by Benn Stell

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – by Paul Kennedy

Macro-Trading Related:

Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win – by Jack D. Schwager

The Alchemy of Finance – by George Soros

The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economics and the Threat of Financial Collapse – by Michael Pettis

The Dao of Capital – by Mark Spitznagel

Profiting from Monetary Policy: Investing Through the Business Cycle – by Thomas Aubrey

The Next Perfect Trade: A Magic Sword of Necessity – by Alex Gurevich

The Art of Short Selling – by Kathryn F. Staley

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money – by Steven Drobny

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets – by Steven Drobny

More Money Than God – by Sebastian Mallaby

Merger Masters: Tales of Arbitrage – by Kate Welling

Currency Wars – by Jim Rickards

The Dollar Trap: How The U.S. Dollar Tightened it’s Grip on Global Finance – by Eswar S. Prasad

Fixing Global Finance – by Martin Wolf

Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance – by David Lubin

How Markets Really Work:

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution – by Andrew W. Lo

The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward – by Benoit Mandelbrot

A Man For All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I beat the Dealer and the Market – by Edward O. Thorp

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

When Genius Failed – by Roger Lowenstein

Predicting The Markets – by Edward Yardeni

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places – by Michael J. Mauboussin

The Origin of Financial Crises – by George Cooper

The Money Formula: Dodgy Finance, Pseudo Science, and How Mathematicians Took Over the Markets – by Paul Wilmott

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanit in the World of Risk and Return – by Mihir Desai

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction – by Richard Bookstaber

Am I Being Too Subtle? Straight Talk From a Business Rebel – by Sam Zell

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy – by Dani Rodrik

Some Actually Practical Economic Theory :

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

The Road to Serfdom – by F.A. Hayek

Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – by Hyman Minsky

America’s Great Depression – by Murray Rothbard

Socialism – by Ludwig Von Mises

Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist – by Hyman Minsky

The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap: A Hazardous Road for the World Economy – by Richard Koo

The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japans Great Recession – by Richard Koo

Monetary Regimes and Inflation: History, Economics, and Political Relationships – by Peter Bernholz

The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions – by Irving Fischer

Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System – by Barry Eichengreem

Sizing and Position Strategies:

Fortunes Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street – by William Poundstone

The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion, The Theory and Practice (aka the Kelly-Criterion Handbook) – by Leonard MacLean and Edward O. Thorp

Thinking in Bets – by Anne Duke

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life – by Avinash Dixit

Skin in the Game – by Nassim Taleb

Understanding Cycles:

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side – by Howard Marks

Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle – by Edward Chancellor

Tomorrow Gold – by Marc Faber

The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays edited – by Richard M. Ebeling



The Structure of Production – by Mark Skousen

Anatomy of the Bear: Lesson from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms – by Russel Napier

Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places – by Scott Fearon

Dealing with Central Banks and Monetary Policy:

Creature from Jekyll Island – by Edward Griffin

End the Fed – by Ron Paul

Collusion: How Central Banks Rigged The World – by Nomi Prins

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire – by Neil Irwin

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World – by Liaquat Ahamed

Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit – by Charles W. Calomiris

Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government – by Paul Volcker

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan – by Sebastian Mallaby

Valuation :

Security Analysis – by Benjamin Graham

Margin of Safety – by Seth Klarman

The Most Important Thing Illuminated – by Howard Marks

The Essays of Warren Buffet: Lessons for Corporate America – by Lawrence A Cunningham

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius – by Joel Greenblatt

Contrarian Investment Strategies: Beat the Market Against the Crowd – by David Dreman

A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street – by Mark Skousen

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You – by Scott E. Page

Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports – by Howard Schilit

Pitch the Perfect Investment – by Paul D. Sonkin

Fortunes in Special Situations in the Stock Market: The Authorized Edition – by Maurece Schiller

Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing – by Joel Tillinghast

Big Mistakes: the Best Investors and Their Worst Investments – by Michael Batnick

Understanding Options:

The Intelligent Option Investor: Applying Value Investing to the World of Options – by Erik Kobayashi-Solomon

Commodity Options – by Carley Garner

Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options – by Nassim Taleb (difficult)

The Study of Complex Systems, Biology, Chaos Theory, and Various Works:

Simply Complexity – by Neil Johnson

How Nature Works: the Science of Self Organized Criticality – by Per Bak

Chaos: Making a New Science – by James Gleick

SCALE: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies – by Geoffrey West

BEHAVE: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst – by Robert M. Spolsky

Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life – by Albert-laszlo Barabasi & Jennifer Frangos

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect – by Judea Pearl

The Selfish Gene – by Richard Dawkins

Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness – by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Collapse of Complex Societies – by Joseph A. Tainter

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds – by Daniel C. Dennett

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries – by Safi Bahcall

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire – by Chalmers Johnson

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another – by Philip Ball