Here are 40 books that Finding Alpha fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve spent my career studying the paradox that low-risk investing can lead to high returns. As an author and a multi-billion-dollar fund manager, I’ve seen firsthand how markets reward patience, discipline, and avoiding unnecessary risks. These books shaped my thinking—challenging conventional wisdom, deepening my understanding of risk, and reinforcing why defensive investing works. I love uncovering ideas that go against the grain, especially when they’re backed by data. Whether you’re an investor or just fascinated by how we make decisions under uncertainty, these books will change the way you see markets—and maybe even the way you invest.
Bogle’s philosophy is simple yet powerful: focus on the long term, keep costs low, and let compounding do the heavy lifting. I’ve always believed that great investing is about avoiding unnecessary risks and staying disciplined, and Bogle’s book distills that wisdom better than anyone else.
While I take a different approach than pure indexing, his principles of cost efficiency and long-term thinking are universal. Every investor—whether a stock picker or a passive indexer—should read this book at least once.
The best-selling index investing "bible" offers new information and is updated to reflect the latest market data The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is the classic guide to getting smart about the market. Legendary mutual fund veteran John C. Bogle reveals his key to getting more out of investing: low-cost index funds. Bogle describes the simplest and most effective investment strategy for building wealth over the long term: buy and hold, at very low cost, a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500 Stock Index. Such an index portfolio is the only investment that guarantees your fair share of…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’ve spent my career studying the paradox that low-risk investing can lead to high returns. As an author and a multi-billion-dollar fund manager, I’ve seen firsthand how markets reward patience, discipline, and avoiding unnecessary risks. These books shaped my thinking—challenging conventional wisdom, deepening my understanding of risk, and reinforcing why defensive investing works. I love uncovering ideas that go against the grain, especially when they’re backed by data. Whether you’re an investor or just fascinated by how we make decisions under uncertainty, these books will change the way you see markets—and maybe even the way you invest.
Risk is the invisible force that shapes our world, yet few books capture its history and significance as brilliantly as this one. When I first read this book, I was struck by how Bernstein connects probability theory, human psychology, and investing into one seamless narrative. It made me realize that mastering risk isn’t just about crunching numbers—it’s about understanding human nature.
From Pascal and Gauss to modern finance, this book reveals how we’ve learned to tame uncertainty. As an investor, it reinforced my belief that risk isn’t something to fear but to understand and use wisely.
A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable ...an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." -The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." -The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book ...Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." -Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." -The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." -Worth "No one…
I’ve spent my career studying the paradox that low-risk investing can lead to high returns. As an author and a multi-billion-dollar fund manager, I’ve seen firsthand how markets reward patience, discipline, and avoiding unnecessary risks. These books shaped my thinking—challenging conventional wisdom, deepening my understanding of risk, and reinforcing why defensive investing works. I love uncovering ideas that go against the grain, especially when they’re backed by data. Whether you’re an investor or just fascinated by how we make decisions under uncertainty, these books will change the way you see markets—and maybe even the way you invest.
Long before factor investing became mainstream, Haugen was making waves by proving that markets aren’t as efficient as economists once believed. When I first encountered his research, I felt a mix of excitement and validation—his data-backed insights on low-risk stocks outperforming high-risk ones aligned perfectly with my own findings.
This book is a goldmine for anyone who wants to dig into the origins of quantitative investing. Haugen wasn’t just ahead of his time—he changed the way we understand market inefficiencies.
Sparked with wry wit and humor, this clever and insightful text provides clear and undeniable evidence that the stock market is, in the author's view, inefficient, and that important aspects of market behavior cannot be explained by models based on rational economic behavior. Intended for Financial Markets and Institutions, and Money and Capitals Markets courses at the undergraduate level. *Tackles important issues in today's financial market in a highly conversational and entertaining manner that will appeal to most students, with relatively short, 'punchy' paragraphs that entice readers to go on. *Provides clear explanations of the CAPM and the APT. *Analyzes…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I’ve spent my career studying the paradox that low-risk investing can lead to high returns. As an author and a multi-billion-dollar fund manager, I’ve seen firsthand how markets reward patience, discipline, and avoiding unnecessary risks. These books shaped my thinking—challenging conventional wisdom, deepening my understanding of risk, and reinforcing why defensive investing works. I love uncovering ideas that go against the grain, especially when they’re backed by data. Whether you’re an investor or just fascinated by how we make decisions under uncertainty, these books will change the way you see markets—and maybe even the way you invest.
This book couldn’t have come at a better time. In a world where traditional return assumptions no longer hold, Ilmanen offers a sobering yet practical guide to navigating lower expected returns. His research-backed approach challenges you to think critically about diversification, risk premia, and the shifting nature of markets.
What I love most is that he doesn’t just diagnose the problem—he provides a roadmap for adapting. For investors willing to embrace a new reality, this book is a must-read.
Elevate your game in the face of challenging market conditions with this eye-opening guide to portfolio management
Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least provides an evidence-based blueprint for successful investing when decades of market tailwinds are turning into headwinds.
For a generation, falling yields and soaring asset prices have boosted realized returns. However, this past windfall leaves retirement savers and investors now facing the prospect of record-low future expected returns. Emphasizing this pressing challenge, the book highlights the role that timeless investment practices - discipline, humility, and patience - will play in enabling…
I’m a Swiss researcher and university professor who applies mathematics and psychology to build quantitative models for financial decision-making. Most of my scientific contributions belong to a field of research called behavioral finance, that is, the study of how psychology affects financial decisions. I love mathematics, and I am fascinated by its ability to describe complex mechanisms, including those that generate human behavior.
This book inspired me to apply quantitative and theoretical models to analyse the impact of human psychology on financial decision-making. The book is sometimes a bit technical, but I felt that that the explanations around the mathematical requirements sufficiently supported the development of my own intuition about their economic and psychological motivation.
I learned from this book how to combine economic theory and psychology to explain empirical and experimental evidence on asset prices. As a mathematician, I was excited to learn how Prof. Shefrin mathematically included psychological factors in classical models for financial decision-making and analyzed the implications for asset prices.
Behavioral finance is the study of how psychology affects financial decision making and financial markets. It is increasingly becoming the common way of understanding investor behavior and stock market activity. Incorporating the latest research and theory, Shefrin offers both a strong theory and efficient empirical tools that address derivatives, fixed income securities, mean-variance efficient portfolios, and the market portfolio. The book provides a series of examples to illustrate the theory.
A noted quantitative hedge fund manager and quant finance author, Ernie is the founder of QTS Capital Management and Predictnow.ai. Previously he has applied his expertise in machine learning at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center’s Human Language Technologies group, at Morgan Stanley’s Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence Group, and at Credit Suisse’s Horizon Trading Group. Ernie was quoted by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and the CIO magazine, and interviewed on CNBC’s Closing Bell program. He is an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Master’s in Data Science program and supervises student theses there. Ernie holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.
As the book’s name suggests, it focuses on factor investing – i.e. long-term investments. Example: what do you think is the real (inflation-adjusted) return of the US stock vs bond markets over time? What is the best way to hedge inflation? (The answer may surprise you!)Nevertheless, a trader will also find inspiration in many of the market themes discussed. Example: Why is a mean-reverting strategy equivalent to shorting realized volatility?
This book has even less math than my 1st book pick, since Andrew Ang used it for his investment class for MBAs. Andrew was a well-known finance professor at Columbia University (where Warren Buffet got his Master’s). He is now Head of BlackRock (AUM=$9.5T!) Systematic Wealth Solutions. I have exchanged emails with him, and he is very friendly and patient with questions.
Stocks and bonds? Real estate? Hedge funds? Private equity? If you think those are the things to focus on in building an investment portfolio, Andrew Ang has accumulated a body of research that will prove otherwise. In his new book Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing, Ang upends the conventional wisdom about asset allocation by showing that what matters aren't asset class labels but the bundles of overlapping risks they represent. Making investments is like eating a healthy diet, Ang says: you've got to look through the foods you eat to focus on the nutrients they contain. Failing…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am a historian of education and twentieth-century U.S. history. Public schooling has been transformative for me, opening up a world of opportunities, but I know many others are not nearly so lucky. This has shaped my interest in the history of public schooling, including its promise of democracy and opportunity and the too-often reality of the way it replicates and deepens social and economic inequalities. I think history helps us understand our world, including to see the roots of inequality we live with today and to think about how we might build a more equitable system.
I love this book because it takes what we largely take for granted—local property tax and the educational inequality it produces—and shows how and why this developed over time and whose interests it has served. While we have tended to assume that funding inequality is the unfortunate byproduct of a long attachment to localism, this book explores how, in California, the state moved from centralized and more equitable funding to more localized and unequal funding through the political lobbying of the elites who benefited.
Taking unequal funding seriously as a deliberate project and a cornerstone for other kinds of social and economic inequalities makes us rethink many aspects of educational inequality we live with today. This book consequently says profound things about the history of American education and educational inequality, past and present.
In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.
From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs…
I first started studying traders while working at London Business School in the early 1990s. This was the start of a lifelong fascination with traders and the psychology of financial behavior. Why do traders talk so much about their emotions? Why does so much of what they do fit so poorly with how economists think markets work? How do financial firms fail to notice rogue traders and other massive risks? And recently, why do investment banks and police forces both seem so good at avoiding uncomfortable knowledge? These are all questions that have fascinated me and which I have been lucky to be paid to research and advise on.
This book is an amusing, honest, and insightful account of the ways technology has changed financial trading from someone who has lived through enormous changes in the ways financial markets and investment banks operate.
I love the way in which this very readable book raises big questions about the evolution of financial markets and trading whilst bringing the arguments to life with personal stories. It's a lot of fun to read, but along the way, you will learn a great deal about investment banks and the creative and sometimes destructive uses technological advances are put to in our rapidly changing world.
'Eloquent, entertaining and accessible.' FT Adviser
When Kevin Rodgers embarked on his career in finance, dealing rooms were filled with clamouring traders and gesticulating salesmen. Nearly three decades later, the bustle has gone and the loudest noise you're likely to hear is the gentle tapping of keyboards.
Why Aren't They Shouting? is one banker's chronicle of this silent revolution, taking us from an age of shouted phone calls and alpha males right up to today's world of computer geeks and complex derivatives. Along the way, Rodgers offers a masterclass in how modern banking actually works, exploring the seismic changes to…
My father was the child of poor New York emigrants who, like our Ireland-born subject, Paul O’Dwyer, made his way into the American middle class through education, hard work, the beneficial effects of the New Deal, and the impact of labor organizing. All of these had the added benefit of restraining the tides of economic inequality and easing the galling undertow of racism. As American society retreated in my adult lifetime into rank nativism, political race-baiting, and an ever-widening gulf between the very rich and everyone else, I was attracted to the idea of taking the measure of a lawyer-activist-politician in New York in the 20th century, Paul O’Dwyer.
One of O’Dwyer’s early prominent battles for the First Amendment and civil rights occurred when he represented families evicted for opposing a racial color line in the selection of tenants of MetLife’s Stuyvesant Town in lower Manhattan, built with assistance from the La Guardia administration.
Through Bagli’s carefully researched history of this watershed battle over the authority of a private landlord to bar African Americans, he explains that O’Dwyer’s involvement in the case on behalf of progressive tenants helped pave the way for Metlife to build the smaller Riverton housing development in Harlem as a concession to critics. Over time, city and state laws would make housing discrimination illegal.
A veteran New York Times reporter dissects the most spectacular failure in real estate history
Real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of dollars when their much-vaunted purchase of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village in New York City failed to deliver the expected profits. But how did Tishman Speyer walk away from the deal unscathed, while others took the financial hit—and MetLife scored a $3 billion profit?
Illuminating the world of big real estate the way Too Big to Fail did for banks, Other People’s Money is a riveting account of politics, high finance, and the hubris…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
In the early 2000s, I noticed that lots of good American jobs were being lost to China. I was taught in college economics that trade was always win-win and that the government should stay out of the economy. I started reading the literature and found a number of flaws with these free trade and extreme free-market doctrines. The flaws were there in plain sight, but US trade economists, with vanishingly few exceptions, were ignoring them. Not only were the costs to our economy and our workers enormous, but the frustration of American workers with 30 years of failed promises by both parties has made our politics angrier and more divisive.
When I was an investment banker in the 80s and early 90s, the prevailing mantra was that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. Nevertheless, I wondered whether slicing and dicing mortgages into different classes of derivatives and selling them to other financial institutions actually added value to the real economy.
This book made it clear to me that it does not and shows how the overgrowth of the financial sector—rising from four to five percent of GDP in the 1970s to over eight percent in the 2000s—caused the Great Recession of 2008. This explosion of debt was used almost exclusively to buy existing assets, thus crowding out lending for plant, equipment, and research.
The Recession is over, but financialization, a powerful and independent factor undermining US industrial policy, continues unchecked.
"A well-told exploration of why our current economy is leaving too many behind." —The New York Times
In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum.
A key reason, says Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, is the fact that Wall Street is no longer…
