“…The successful macro-investor must be some magical mixture of an acute analyst, an investment scholar, a listener, a historian, a river boat gambler, and be a voracious reader – reading is crucial…” ~ Barton Biggs 

“…Try to acquire every bit of fundamental information available. Read extensively…” ~ Amos Hostetter

Trading in the real world markets (especially macro-trading) requires multi-disciplinary principles. That’s why I believe the first rule in becoming a successful speculator is to be an avid reader across various topics. 

Such as: financial history, investing strategies, valuation, economic philosophy, psychology, risk and probabilities, complex systems, politics, biology/ecology, and even physics. 

Having a large ‘mental toolbox’ full of practical tools, knowledge, and principles you can pull from is extremely important. This is where your edge comes from (aka competitive advantage). 

Over the years since I began trading – I’ve read hundreds of books across multiple subjects. And I still try to read at least one book a week (25-50 pages an evening). 

In fact, Charlie Munger – Warren Buffet’s smarter half – has said he reads upwards of 500-800 quality pages per day, and believes this has helped him most with his career. 

I 100% agree with him. 

I love sitting up until 3 a.m., reading and writing down notes while listening to jazz-and-house music.

It’s my favorite way to study, reflect and prepare for a trade. . .

So what do I look for in a book? I believe that a good book should be – at least for trading – practical.

Most books are just noise – full of useless theories, redundancy, and opinions that won’t do anything for the reader in the long-term.

Thus – as a speculator – I want books with original ideas and sound principles that I can add to my ‘mental toolbox’.

So after thinking it over a long while – I put together a list of books that have impacted my thinking, trading strategies, and gave me the tools I needed to have an edge in the market.

I believe all these books are worth reading and will give you the great multi-disciplinary insight and practical use needed to become a better speculator. 

Adem Tumerkan, 
(If you like my reading list – make sure to check out Speculators Anonymous Premium)

*note: added additional books on March-21-2023

Behavioral Finance and Psychology:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow – by Daniel Khaneman
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don’t – by Nate Silver
• The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – by Gustave Le Bon
• The Undoing Project – by Michael Lewis
• Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics – By Richard Thaler
• What I learned Losing a Million Dollars – by Jim Paul
• The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing – by Michael J. Mauboussin
• Behavioral Investing: A Practitioners Guide to Applying Behavioral Finance – by James Montier
• A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility – by Nicola Gennaioli 
• Irrational Exuberance – by Robert J. Shiller
• The Tipping Point: How Little Thing Can Make a Big Difference – by Malcolm Gladwell
• Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism – by George A. Akerlof
• The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness – by Morgan Housel
• How To Lie With Statistics – by Darrell Huff

Randomness, Risk, Dealing with Probabilities and the Unpredictable:

• The Black Swan – by Nassim Taleb
• Fooled By Randomness – by Nassim Taleb (a fundamental read)
• The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives – by Leonard Mlodinow
• Risk Savvy – by Gerd Gigerenzer
• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk – by Peter L. Bernstein
• Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge in an Uncertain World – by Ian Bremmer
• War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics – by Jeffrey A. Friedman
• Radical Uncertainty: Decision Making Beyond the Numbers – by John Kay/Mervyn King
• Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails – by Nassim Taleb (his most technical book – for the advanced)
• The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Everyday – by David J. Hand
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don’t – by Nate Silver
• The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty – by Sam L. Savage
• Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusions with Reality Can Lead to Disaster on Wall St. and Real Life – by Emanuel Derman

Financial History (Booms and Busts + the Study of Major Empires that Rose and Fell):

• Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems – by Didier Sornette
• Big Debt Crises (Three Vol. Set) – by Ray Dalio
• The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History – by David Hacket Fischer
• Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (7^th Edition) – by Charles P. Kindleberger
• The Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation – by Edward Chancellor
• BULL: A History of Boom and Busts – by Maggie Mahar
• American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold – by Sebastian Edwards
• CRASHED: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World – by Adam Tooze
• A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation – by Scott Nation
• The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War – by Benn Stell
• The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – by Paul Kennedy
• The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire – by Kyle Harper
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century – by Thomas Piketty 
• The Rise and Fall of American Growth – by Robert J. Gordon
• The Great Rupture: Three Empires, Four Turning points, and the Future of Humanity – by Viktor Svhets (a must-read)
• Why Nations Fail – by Daron Acemoglu
• Money For Nothing – by Steven Levenson (best book on the South Sea bubble in 1700’s London)
• The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order (1916-1931) – by Adam Tooze
• 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler – by Tobias Straunmann
• Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles – by John D. Turner
• Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts, and Bailouts at CITI – by James Freeman
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – by Jared Diamond
• The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam – by Barbara W. Tuchman
• The Collapse of Complex Societies – by Joseph A. Tainter

Global Finance and Trade Related (Political Economy ~ Globalization, Protectionism, Banking, and Free/Controlled Markets) 

• The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy – by Dani Rodrik
• Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy – by Franics Fukuyama
• Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World (1600-1900) – by Stephen R. Brown
• Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts The Global Economy – by Michael Pettis
• Capitalism In America: A History – by Alan Greenspan
• Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy – by Jonathan Haskel
• A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World – by William J. Bernstein
• The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions – by Jeffrey D. Sachs
• Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of the New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis – by Anatole Kaletsky
• The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making us All Poorer – by Nicholas Shaxson
• Empire of Cotton: A Global History – by Sven Beckert
• EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts – by Ashoka Mody
• The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order – by Benn Steil
• The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy – by Mervyn King
• Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance – by Adair Turner
• Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality – by Vito Tanzi
• American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation – by Sarah L. Quinn
• The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason – by Larry Neal

Macro-Trading Related:

• Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win – by Jack D. Schwager
• The Alchemy of Finance – by George Soros
• The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economics and the Threat of Financial Collapse – by Michael Pettis
• The Dao of Capital – by Mark Spitznagel
• Profiting from Monetary Policy: Investing Through the Business Cycle – by Thomas Aubrey
• The Next Perfect Trade: A Magic Sword of Necessity – by Alex Gurevich
• The Art of Short Selling – by Kathryn F. Staley
• The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money – by Steven Drobny
• Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets – by Steven Drobny
• More Money Than God – by Sebastian Mallaby
• Merger Masters: Tales of Arbitrage – by Kate Welling
• Currency Wars – by Jim Rickards
• The Dollar Trap: How The U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance – by Eswar S. Prasad
• Fixing Global Finance – by Martin Wolf
• Dance of the Trillions: Developing Countries and Global Finance – by David Lubin
• Capital Wars: The Rise of Global Liquidity – by Michael J. Howell 
• Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rates – by Jeffry A. Frieden
• The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten  Rights of the Poor – by Will Easterly

How Markets Really Work:

• Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution – by Andrew W. Lo
• The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward – by Benoit Mandelbrot (a fundamental read)
• The Crisis Of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, And the New Crash Normal – by Ludwig B. Chincarini
• A Man For All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I beat the Dealer and the Market – by Edward O. Thorp
• The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall
• When Genius Failed – by Roger Lowenstein
• Predicting The Markets – by Edward Yardeni
• More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places – by Michael J. Mauboussin
• The Origin of Financial Crises – by George Cooper
• The Money Formula: Dodgy Finance, Pseudo Science, and How Mathematicians Took Over the Markets – by Paul Wilmott
• The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return – by Mihir Desai
• The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction – by Richard Bookstaber
• Am I Being Too Subtle? Straight Talk From a Business Rebel – by Sam Zell
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt – by Michael Lewis
• The Rise of the Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Supression – by Tim Lee/Jamie Lee
• Dark Pools: The Rise of Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market – by Scott Patterson
• How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and the Future – by Barry Eichengreen 
• The Incredible Shrinking Alpha – by Larry E. Swedroe
• The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated, and Colluded to Rig the Worlds Most Important Number – by Liam Vaughan

Some Actually Practical Economic Theories:

• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• The Road to Serfdom – by F.A. Hayek
• Stabilizing an Unstable Economy – by Hyman Minsky
• America’s Great Depression – by Murray Rothbard 
• Socialism – by Ludwig Von Mises
• Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist – by Randal L Wray.
• The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap: A Hazardous Road for the World Economy – by Richard Koo
• The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japans Great Recession – by Richard Koo
• Monetary Regimes and Inflation: History, Economics, and Political Relationships – by Peter Bernholz
• The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions – by Irving Fischer
• Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System – by Barry Eichengreem

Sizing and Position Strategies:

• Fortunes Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street – by William Poundstone
• The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion, The Theory and Practice (aka the Kelly-Criterion Handbook) – by Leonard MacLean and Edward O. Thorp
• Thinking in Bets – by Anne Duke
• The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life – by Avinash Dixit
• Skin in the Game – by Nassim Taleb
• The Art of Execution: How The World’s Best Investors get it Wrong and Still Make Millions – by Lee Freeman-Shor

Understanding Cycles:

• Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side – by Howard Marks 
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer – by Donella H. Meadows (an absolute fundamental read)
• Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle – by Edward Chancellor (key for understanding commodity cycles)
• Tomorrow Gold – by Marc Faber
• The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays edited – by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• The Structure of Production – by Mark Skousen
• Anatomy of the Bear: Lesson from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms – by Russel Napier
• Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places – by Scott Fearon

Dealing with Central Banks and Monetary Policy:

• Creature from Jekyll Island – by Edward Griffin
• End the Fed – by Ron Paul
• Collusion: How Central Banks Rigged The World – by Nomi Prins
• The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire – by Neil Irwin
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World – by Liaquat Ahamed
• Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit – by Charles W. Calomiris
• Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government – by Paul Volcker
• The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan – by Sebastian Mallaby

Valuation:

• Security Analysis – by Benjamin Graham
• Margin of Safety – by Seth Klarman
• The Most Important Thing Illuminated – by Howard Marks
• The Essays of Warren Buffet: Lessons for Corporate America – by Lawrence A Cunningham
• You Can Be a Stock Market Genius – by Joel Greenblatt
• Contrarian Investment Strategies: Beat the Market Against the Crowd – by David Dreman
• A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street – by Mark Skousen
• The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You – by Scott E. Page
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports – by Howard Schilit
• Pitch the Perfect Investment – by Paul D. Sonkin
• Fortunes in Special Situations in the Stock Market: The Authorized Edition – by Maurece Schiller 
• Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing – by Joel Tillinghast 
• Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments – by Michael Batnick

Understanding Options (and Optionality):

• The Intelligent Option Investor: Applying Value Investing to the World of Options – by Erik Kobayashi-Solomon
• Antifragile – by Nassim Taleb (a fundamental read)
• Commodity Options – by Carley Garner
• Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options – by Nassim Taleb (pretty difficult; math heavy)

The Study of Complex Systems, Biology, Chaos Theory, and Various Works:

• Simply Complexity – by Neil Johnson
• How Nature Works: the Science of Self-Organized Criticality – by Per Bak
• Chaos: Making a New Science – by James Gleick
• SCALE: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies – by Geoffrey West
• BEHAVE: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst – by Robert M. Spolsky
• Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life – by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi & Jennifer Frangos
• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect – by Judea Pearl
• The Selfish Gene – by Richard Dawkins
• Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness – by Peter Godfrey-Smith 
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds – by Daniel C. Dennett
• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries – by Safi Bahcall
• Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire – by Chalmers Johnson
• Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another – by Philip Ball
• The Rules of Contagion: How Things Spread, and Why They Stop – by Adam Kucharski
• Guns, Germs, and Steel – by Jared Diamond
• Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction, and Economics – by Paul Ormerod
• The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations – by Dietrich Dorner
• Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results – by David Peter Stroh
• Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers – by Robert M. Sapolsky
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – by Yuval Noah Harari
• Finite and Infinite Games – by James Carse
• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life – by Rory Sutherland
• Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instinct – by Terry Burnham
• The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars have been Won and Lost – by Cathal J. Nolan