Investing Book List (Gavin Baker)

Gavin Baker’s investing reading list, posted on Medium on May 2, 2020 after a talk to Columbia’s student investment club. Kyle saved it under #books-to-read in his May 3rd, 2020 Roam daily note. Original post.

What the list says

• Baker gives a suggested order: One Up on Wall Street; The Warren Buffett Way; accounting through Why Stocks Go Up and Down; valuation through Greenwald’s Value Investing; the interview anthologies (especially Market Wizards and Money Masters of Our Time); competitive advantage through Competition Demystified and Understanding Michael Porter; Buffett’s shareholder letters; behavioral finance through The Undoing Project and the Little Book; The Checklist Manifesto and Superforecasting; then Mauboussin; then whatever interests you.
• For would-be analysts he singles out Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts, Pitch the Perfect Investment (selling ideas to portfolio managers and clients is part of the job), and Investing Against the Tide (what it is like to be a portfolio manager). Accounting and modeling, he says, come from classes, the CFA and doing it.
• Past a point, he argues, studying the craft of investing has diminishing returns, while understanding companies and industries has increasing ones. He also notes how few books exist on growth investing compared with value investing.
• For technology investing he points to Stratechery, Benedict Evans’s newsletter, the a16z blog and podcast, Bill Gurley’s Above the Crowd, and Invest Like the Best.

The list

Every title links to its page here: an anti-library card, or the book page if Kyle has read it. ★ marks the titles Baker italicized as his favorites. Non-book entries (essays, blogs, newsletters, a podcast, a manual) are listed without a page.

Investing

• ★ One Up on Wall Street — Peter Lynch
• Beating the Street — Peter Lynch
• ★ Poor Charlie’s Almanack — Charlie Munger
• ★ Think Twice — Michael Mauboussin
• The Success Equation — Michael Mauboussin
• ★ More Than You Know — Michael Mauboussin
• Expectations Investing — Alfred Rappaport and Michael Mauboussin
• ★ Michael Mauboussin’s essays — Michael Mauboussin. Especially “Measuring the Moat”.
• ★ Bill Gurley’s blog (Above the Crowd) — Bill Gurley. Abovethecrowd.com.
• ★ The Little Book That Beats the Market — Joel Greenblatt
• Value Investing (James Montier) — James Montier
• ★ Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond — Bruce Greenwald
• ★ Investing Against the Tide — Anthony Bolton. The only real description of what it is like to be a professional portfolio manager.
• ★ The Most Important Thing — Howard Marks. He likes the annotated version.
• Mastering the Market Cycle — Howard Marks
• Big Money Thinks Small — Joel Tillinghast
• ★ Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits — Philip Fisher. One of the few books about growth investing.
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefèvre. He likes the annotated version.
• ★ The Warren Buffett Way — Robert Hagstrom
• The Essays of Warren Buffett — Lawrence Cunningham
• ★ Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders — Warren Buffett
• Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist — Roger Lowenstein. He prefers it to The Snowball.
• How to Think Like Benjamin Graham and Invest Like Warren Buffett — Lawrence Cunningham
• A Man for All Markets — Edward O. Thorp
• Contrarian Investment Strategies — David Dreman
• How to Make Money in Stocks — William O’Neil
• ★ Margin of Safety — Seth Klarman
• The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham. Mostly chapters 8 and 20.
• A Zebra in Lion Country — Ralph Wanger
• ★ Chuck Akre’s essays and letters — Chuck Akre. Especially “The Art of (Not) Selling”.
• You Can Be a Stock Market Genius — Joel Greenblatt
• The Little Book That Builds Wealth — Pat Dorsey
• The (Mis)Behavior of Markets — Benoit Mandelbrot
• ★ Capital Returns — Edward Chancellor
• ★ Quality Investing — Lawrence Cunningham. One of the few books about growth investing.
• The Craft of Investing — John Train
• ★ Pitch the Perfect Investment — Paul Sonkin and Paul Johnson
• Deep Value — Tobias Carlisle
• The Investment Checklist — Michael Shearn
• ★ Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts — James Valentine. The best practitioner’s guide to being a professional analyst.
• The Successful Technology Investor — William de Gale
• Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager — Keith McCullough
• Style Investing — Richard Bernstein. Hard to obtain; his summary: value investors differentiate on entries, growth investors on exits.
• The Tao Jones Averages — Bennett Goodspeed
• ★ Invest Like the Best (podcast) — Patrick O’Shaughnessy. Not a book.

Anthologies of interviews

• ★ Market Wizards — Jack Schwager
• ★ The New Market Wizards — Jack Schwager
• ★ Stock Market Wizards — Jack Schwager
• ★ Hedge Fund Market Wizards — Jack Schwager
• ★ The Money Masters — John Train
• ★ The New Money Masters — John Train
• ★ Money Masters of Our Time — John Train. Combines most chapters of the previous two.
• ★ Inside the House of Money — Steven Drobny
• ★ The Manual of Ideas — John Mihaljevic
• ★ Big Mistakes — Michael Batnick

Behavioral Finance

• ★ The Little Book of Behavioral Investing — James Montier. Listed as “The Little Book of Behavioral Finance”.
• ★ The Undoing Project — Michael Lewis
• Inside the Investor’s Brain — Richard Peterson
• Behavioural Investing — James Montier
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman. A serious time commitment; effectively summarized in The Undoing Project.
• Misbehaving — Richard Thaler

Strategy, Forecasting, Competitive Advantage and Technology

• ★ Competition Demystified — Bruce Greenwald
• ★ Understanding Michael Porter — Joan Magretta
• Good to Great — Jim Collins
• Built to Last — Jim Collins
• The Everything Store — Brad Stone. Understanding Amazon is important for almost every investor.
• In the Plex — Steven Levy. Same goes for Google.
• Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson. And Apple.
• Stratechery — Ben Thompson. Newsletter.
• ★ Benedict Evans’s newsletter — Benedict Evans. Newsletter.
• The a16z blog and podcast — a16z
• ★ Jeff Bezos’s Letters to Shareholders — Jeff Bezos. On a par with Buffett’s.
• ★ Incerto (series) — Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A series of books.
• ★ Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock
• The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver
• The Gorilla Game — Geoffrey Moore
• The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen
• ★ Investing: The Last Liberal Art — Robert Hagstrom
• Seeking Wisdom — Peter Bevelin
• The Outsiders — William Thorndike
• Moneyball — Michael Lewis
• ★ The Great Mental Models — Shane Parrish
• Zero to One — Peter Thiel
• ★ The Checklist Manifesto — Atul Gawande
• Loonshots — Safi Bahcall
• Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century — Hermann Simon

Accounting, Valuation, Technical Analysis and Risk

• Why Stocks Go Up and Down — William Pike. The easiest introduction to accounting.
• How to Read a Financial Report — John Tracy. Another easy introduction to accounting.
• Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements — Mary Buffett
• Quality of Earnings — Thornton O’Glove
• Financial Shenanigans — Howard Schilit
• Warren Buffett Accounting Book — Preston Pysh
• Financial Statement Analysis — Martin Fridson
• ★ Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies — McKinsey & Company. The best book on valuation.
• Value: The Four Cornerstones of Corporate Finance — McKinsey & Company
• Trading Risk — Kenneth Grant
• Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing — Andrew Berkin and Larry Swedroe
• The Barra manual — MSCI Barra. Read before becoming a portfolio manager, to understand factors.
• How to Lie with Statistics — Darrell Huff
• Fortune’s Formula — William Poundstone
• Trading for a Living — Alexander Elder
• Efficiently Inefficient — Lasse Pedersen

Connections

• Saved in Kyle’s Roam Quick Capture (May 3rd, 2020) as: https://medium.com/@gavin_baker/investing-book-list-5fba1b80728d - books-to-read
• Books To Read · Value Investing · Michael Mauboussin · Warren Buffett