Reading List

We are frequently asked: what are the best books on investing? How do you develop an investment strategy? Who should you learn from? How should one learn about the energy markets?

In this post, we will cover our favourite books (in order of importance) on:

• Investment strategy

• Decision making

• Economics

• Biographies

• Energy Market

• Climate Change

Learning how to become a good investor is a difficult journey. There are long feedback loops on the decisions you take, behavioural biases to overcome and a required ability to remain rational when under pressure. Our approach combines learning from first principles and copying investing masters, such as Warren Buffett and Joel Greenblatt.

Reading is not enough, one must understand, learn from practice, and then customise approach to utilise strengths and overcome weaknesses. Remember, do not rush, this is a process that takes years and is not something to complete. We re-read many of the below books and learn something new each time.

Investment Strategy:

• Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholder 1965-2014 - Warren E. Buffett

• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America - Warren E. Buffett (Author), Lawrence A. Cunningham (Compiler)

• The Nomad Investment Partnership Letters - Nick Sleep, Qais Zakaria

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

• Margin of Safety - Seth A. Klarman

• Security Analysis: Sixth Edition, Foreword by Warren Buffett - Benjamin Graham, David Dodd

• The Joys of Compounding - Gautam Baid

• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits - Philip Fisher

• You Can Be a Stock Market Genius - Joel Greenblatt

• The Davis Dynasty: Fifty Years of Successful Investing on Wall Street - John Rothchild

• Competitive Strategy - Micheal Porter

• Valuation - Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, David Wessels

• Damodaran on Valuation - Aswath Damodaran

• The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World - Mark Spitznagel

• Incerto Series - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Client Letters - Semper Augustus

• The (Mis)behaviour of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard Hudson

• Irrational Exuberance - Robert Schiller

• Memos From Howard Marks - Oaktree Capital

• The Most Important Thing Illuminated - Howard Marks

• Mastering the Market Cycle - Howard Marks

• Big Mistakes: The best Investors and Their Worst Investments - Micheal Batnick

• The Outsiders - William Thorndike

• Where the Money Is - Adam Sessel

• Capital Returns - Marathon Asset Management LLP

• Dear Shareholder - Lawrence Cunningham

• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald

• The Dhando Investor - Monish Pabrai

• Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns - Michael Mauboussin, Alfred Rappaport

• The Education of a Value Investor - Guy Spier

• The Prospect of Value Investing in China - Li Lu

• Quality Investing - Torkell Eide, Lawrence Cunningham, Patrick Hargreaves

• 100 Baggers - Christopher Mayer

• Beating the Street - Peter Lynch

• Pioneering Portfolio Management - David Swensen

• Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms - Mark Spitznagel

• The 3G Way - Francisco Souza Homem de Mello

• The Dark Side of Valuation - Aswath Damodaran

• Concentrated Investing - Allen Benello, Michael van Biema

• A demon of our own design - Richard Bookstaber

• The Manual of Ideas - John Mihaljevic

• Red Notice - Bill Browder

• Algorithms to Live by - Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

• Latticework: The New Investing - Robert Hagstrom

• The Little Book that Beats the Market - Joel Greenblatt

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton Malkiel

• Stocks for the long run - Jeremy Siegel

Decision Making:

• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger

• Psychology of Human Misjudgment - Charlie Munger

• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

• Noise - Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, Olivier Sibony

• The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande

• The Little Book of Behaviour Investing - James Montier

• Principles - Ray Dalio

• Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke

• The Art of Thinking Clearly - Rolf Dobelli

• Investment Checklist - Michael Shearn

• The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker

• The Model Thinker - Scott Page

• Think Twice - Michael Mauboussin

• Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking - Matthew Syed

• More Than You Know - Michael Mauboussin

Economics:

• Narrative Economics - Robert Schiller

• Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy - William Janeway

• This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly - Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff

• The New Paradigm for Financial Markets - George Soros

• Capital - Thomas Piketty

• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - Ray Dalio

• The Big Debt Crisis - Ray Dalio

• The Alchemy of Finance 2007 - George Soros

• Animal Spirts - George Akerlof, Robert Schiller

Biographies:

• Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist - Roger Lowenstein

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution - Gregory Zuckerman

• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management - Roger Lowenstein

• Models of My Life - Herbert Simon

• The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron - Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind

• The Almanack of Stanley Druckenmiller - Rui Zhi Dong

• Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Lefèvre

Energy Market:

• The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World - Daniel Yergin

• Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air - David MacKay

• Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation - Tony Seba

• Zero Marginal Cost Society - Jeremy Rifkin

• The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweil

• How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil

• Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update - Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers

• We Need To Talk About Xi - Michael Dillon

• Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition - Bent Flyvbjerg

Climate Change:

• Speed and Scale - John Doerr

• How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future - Vaclav Smil

• There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make Or Break Years - Mike Berners-Lee

• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster - Bill Gates

• How Are We Going To Explain This? - Jelmer Mommers

• The Climate Book - Greta Thunberg

• This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein

See our office bookshelf, current reads, and book lists on goodreads.