Our Reading List

We want to offer members additional resources to help build financial and investment knowledge outside of our meetings. Here are some of our Readings recommendations for beginner and seasoned investors alike:

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, written by Burton Gordon Malkiel, a Princeton economist, is a book on the subject of stock markets which popularized the random walk hypothesis. Malkiel argues that asset prices typically exhibit signs of random walk and that one cannot consistently outperform market averages. -Wikipedia

The Intelligent Investor

Known as "the father of value investing" and the "dean of Wall Street," author Benjamin Graham (1894-1976) excelled at making money on the stock market for himself and his clients—without taking big risks. Graham created and taught many principles of investing safely and successfully that modern investors continue to use today. These ideas were built on Graham's diligent, almost surgical, financial evaluation of companies. His experience led to simple, effective logic, upon which Graham built a successful method for investing. -Investopedia

Principles

Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that helped him create unique results in life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to better achieve their goals. Dalio’s original Principles has been downloaded over three million times, and this expanded and revised edition is the first version available in print.

The Success Equation

In most domains of life, skill and luck seem hopelessly entangled. Different levels of skill and varying degrees of good and bad luck are the realities that shape our lives—yet few of us are adept at accurately distinguishing between the two. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to tease out these two threads, examine them, and use the resulting knowledge to make better decisions.

In this provocative book, Michael Mauboussin helps to untangle these intricate strands to offer the structure needed to analyze the relative importance of skill and luck. He offers concrete suggestions for making these insights work to your advantage. Once we understand the extent to which skill and luck contribute to our achievements, we can learn to deal with them in making decisions. -Amazon

Competitive Strategy

Michael E. Porter unravels the rules that govern competition and turns them into powerful analytical tools to help management interpret market signals, forecast the direction of industry development, and position any company to compete more successfully. -Google Books

Pioneering Portfolio Management

(Required Reading for Business Class 438: Portfolio Management)

During his fourteen years as Yale's chief investment officer, David F. Swensen has transformed the management of the university's portfolio. Largely by focusing on nonconventional strategies, including a heavy allocation to private equity, Swensen has achieved an annualized return of 16.2 percent, which has propelled Yale's endowment into the top tier of institutional funds. Now, this acknowledged leader of fund managers draws on his experience and deep knowledge of the financial markets to provide a compendium of powerful investment strategies. -Amazon