40 Books Like Finding Alpha

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reading this book had a profound impact on me–as did the author himself. I had the privilege of meeting Colin Mayer in his wood-paneled office and interviewing him for my own book—an experience that deepened my respect for his thinking. I found myself nodding in agreement as he laid out how far corporations have drifted from their true purpose.

I was struck by his call to move from ownership to stewardship and how closely it aligned with my own belief that purpose must sit at the heart of business. His critique helped sharpen my understanding of corporate governance and reaffirmed my beliefs in the need for a better way forward for business and its relationship with society.

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.

In this book, George Smith explores, defines, and illustrates the crucial role of creativity in communicating with charity supporters. I loved this book because it changed the rules for an entire trade and is still seen as the best book ever on creativity for good causes.

It challenges established thinking yet is packed full of ideas and solutions. From decades of running a successful advertising agency, the author honestly describes and analyses hundreds of effective and less-than-effective fundraising campaigns in a perceptive, often delightfully funny way.

It’s brilliantly written, quirky and provocative, plus packed with practical benefits for any professional communicator. This book should be on every world-changer’s bookshelf.