Invest Without Emotions
Hedge Fund Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win by Jack Schwager (Amazon,) is a collection of interviews of successful hedge fund mangers.
I excerpted the parts I found interesting and personally applicable to me in Evernote. Read that to get an idea of what the book is about.
The book would have been even better if he included some quant hedge fund managers other than Bridgewater’s Dalio.
Recommendation: Read it now!
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Amazon,) is a collection of interviews of successful, white, men who founded tech startups.
The book is good for two things:
Recommendation: skip.
In Principles: Life and Work (Amazon,) Ray Dalio, a highly successful hedge fund manager tries to write out rules for living one’s life and conducting business.
He should have stuck to managing other people’s money and spared us this tome. It is highly repetitive and completely off the rails. He thinks the world and our minds work like “machines” and that if you can figure out how that machine works, you are all set. The problem is that once you call something a “machine,” your imagination is handicapped by the fact that most machines are deterministic. Real life, business and investing is a system – a complex dynamic system. A system that changes based on how the people in the system behave. Good luck trying to “figure it out.”
The book is gibberish. If you really want to read a self-help book, read the very entertaining The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Amazon.)
Fragile by Design (Amazon) by Calomiris and Haber explains how the banking system of every country is the result of a unique set of starting conditions and how politics and culture shape their overall stability and purpose. They call it the Game of Bank Bargains.
My personal take-away from this is India is screwed. We will never get rid of our public banks who will conspire with our politicians to bleed our country dry. Politicians will find our banks ready and willing to impose an inflation tax on us. Who could blame them when hardly 2% of our population pays an income tax? We seem to have borrowed from the worst elements of US, Mexican and Brazilian banking systems. No Hope.
Read the book!
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (Amazon,) is about how over the years, Americans have become less rational and more prone to magical thinking.
The author, Kurt Andersen, posits that Americans have self-selected both from a genetic and cultural point of view to believe in fantasies. The rise of social media and the internet has allowed everyone to live in his “own” truth, a fantasy land. He touches upon all weird, non-scientific things that Americans believe to be true, their outlandish religious beliefs, gun ownership and so on.
The main take-away for me was this: a liberal government can keep its populace fed and make sure that the country progresses scientifically and economically. However, it cannot give its citizens purpose. Purpose is something everybody seeks. And if the government cant give it, then religions/cult/tribes will fill the void. And the more vulnerable you are economically, the more you seek out a tribe to be part of.
Read the book!