Fooled by Randomness

Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career.

Jim Paul's meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all - his fortune, his reputation, and his job - in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.

In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time.

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's visionary vice chairman and Warren Buffett's indispensable financial partner, has outperformed market indexes again and again, and he believes any investor can do the same. His notion of "elementary, worldly wisdom" - a set of interdisciplinary mental models involving economics, business, psychology, ethics, and management - allows him to keep his emotions out of his investments and avoid the common pitfalls of bad judgment.

George Soros, called "a superstar among money managers" by The New York Times, shares the investment strategies he uses to read the mind of the market.

Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past 40 years to create unique results in both life and business - and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.

Instead of trying to predict "Black Swan" events such as coups or crises, forecasters should look at how political systems handle disorder. The best indicator of a country's future trajectory is not a lengthy past stability, but recent moderate volatility.

One of the most important works ever written on investment theory, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits lays out the fundamental principles of intelligent investing.

We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species. In the epic sweep of history, how does our biology affect the arc of war and peace, justice and persecution? How have our brains evolved alongside our cultures?

Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of carrying only opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends - why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty - we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.

What happens when a young Wall Street investment banker spends a small fortune to have lunch with Warren Buffett? He becomes a real value investor. In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward. Spier reveals his transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe, driven by greed, to a sophisticated investor who enjoys success without selling his soul to the highest bidder.

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology challenging the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of the world's most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound impact on many fields - including business, medicine, and politics - but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research in one book.

Quantitative trading strategies - known to many as “black boxes” - have gained a reputation of being difficult to explain and even harder to understand. While there is a certain level of complexity to this approach, with the right guidance, you can successfully overcome potential obstacles and begin to excel in this arena. That’s why expert fund manager Rishi Narang has created Inside the Black Box. In a straightforward, nontechnical style - supplemented by real-world examples and informative anecdotes - this reliable resource takes you on a detailed tour through the black box.

First published in 1923, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is the fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest speculators who ever lived. Now, almost 90 years later, it remains the most widely read, highly recommended investment book ever written. Generations of investors have found that it has more to teach them about themselves and other investors than years of experience in the market. They have also discovered that its trading advice and keen analyses of market price movements rings true.

A detailed guide to overcoming the most frequently encountered psychological pitfalls of investing. Bias, emotion, and overconfidence are just three of the many behavioral traits that can lead investors to lose money or achieve lower returns. Behavioral finance, which recognizes that there is a psychological element to all investor decision-making, can help you overcome this obstacle.