Summer Reading List
"The Dhando Investor" by Mohnish Pabrai. Excellent book about deep value investing.
"Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingstone — the best book about being an entrepreneur that I've ever read.
"Confessions of a Street Addict" — Jim Cramer. Rereading the book now that I'm working more closely with thestreet.com its great to reread the story of its beginnings.
"Portfolio Magazine" — I actually learned quite a bit from several of the stories. Check out the T. Boone Pickens profile as well as the story about Citadel and the story by Michael Lewis on the possibility of a sports exchange
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb. I'm actually debating not reading this. I read Fooled by Randomness and it was very good but I'm tired of the idea that "everybody is mediocre and eventually everyone gets screwed by an unpredictable event". In his examples in "Fooled" all of the people lost money not because an event was unpredictable but because they kept doubling down on their losses. I know a trader who has been bearish this entire market for over a year but he's made money every month because he's not religious about his opinions. Avoid religion and you'll do ok in a Black Swan event. That said, the book has a lot of hype and I'm looking forward to checking it out.
"3 Questions.." by Ken Fisher. This book reminds me of a book from 2002 called "Tomorrows' Gold" by Marc Faber. IT has so many facts backing up its ideas and theories that it’s a guaranteed IQ-improver.
"hackers and painters" by Paul Graham. Graham started Viaweb, because got bought by Yahoo for $45mm. Now Graham runs Y Combinator, a VC fund. The basic idea of Y Combinator is that it doesn't cost a lot to start a business. Give a founder/hacker who has passion $10k to get going and that might be enough. His book is about entrepeneuralism but also a nice "state of the union" on the current state of hacking and software.
"The Wisdom of Crowds" — by James Surowiecki — this book has been around awhile but I haven't read it. Given the nature of Stockpickr.com I'm curious about its underlying premise, which I guess is somewhat similar to trend following.
"Grande Expectations" — this book is a year in the life of Starbucks stock. A fascinating discussion of the various tensions that occur every day between the bears and bulls in a stock.
