$20 Per Gallon (2009) – by Christopher Steiner
This is a amazing book.   Let me give the contents first.
$4 Prologue: The road to $20 and Civilization Renovation
$6: Society Change and the Dead SUV
$8: The Skies will Empty
$10: the Car Diminished but Reborn
$12: Urban Revolution and Suburban Decay
$14: The Fate of Small Towns, U.S. Manufacturing Renaissance, and Our Material World
$16: The Food Web Deconstructed
$18: The Renaissance of the Rails
$20: The Future of Energy

I will review in more details soon.  Terrific read.  I can’t wait til the future starts arriving.

Alchemy of Finance (1987) – by George Soros
This is Soros’ the Hungarian Emigre’ who broke the Bank of England in 1992, finest work.  In Alchemy, Soros introduces the concept of what he calls “Reflexivity”.
Reflexivity describes the way that when the facts are changed significantly enough the underlying fundamentals are also changed, thereby stoping the existing momentum of a given system, particularly in financial markets.  The concept of Reflexivity helps to understand how markets reach watershed moments that become the inflection points.  For the aspiring professional investor, this is a fundamentally very important concept to understand.  Soros shows countless examples in his 1986 trading diary, which chronicles the cascading collapse in the US dollar and the price of oil, that was orchestrated from the Thatcher and Reagon administrations, and how these political events, shaped the economic and market dynamics.

Fooled by Randomness (1999) – by Nicholas Tassim Taleb
Taleb has written other books, but you really only need to read the first 50 pages of ‘Fooled’, to get his point.  Taleb is a Crisis Hunter in capital markets.  He search for mispriced low-probablity events, and makes the opposite bet of the insurers, he bets that those events are more likely to happen, than is currently being predicted by market prices.  This is the concept of “fat tails”, which show that the normal distribution bell curve, is in accurate.  That as you go out the tails of the curves, probabilities can increase.  This concept is critical to understanding how events such as the 2008 financial crisis, can occur with far greater than (1 in billion(s), chance.

Common Stocks,  Uncommon Profits – By Phiip Fisher
Fisher’s book is the holy bible of growth stock investing.  Fisher is also one of the founders of the investment advisory (or investment counsel) business.  Fisher and others were young Analysts that found themselves out of work in 1930 and 1931.  They realized that there was business to be had in giving private individuals investment advice, independent of the Wall Street machine.  Fisher bible on the basic elements of common stock investing remain relevant and core, to this day.

Confessions of a Street Addict  (2003) – By Jim Cramer
This is Cramer at his best.  Cramer chronicles his life, from the middle class kid of a Philadelphia Cop, to sleeping in his Ford Fairmont on I-5, to Harvard Law, then Goldman Sach (1984), then starting his own hedge fund in 1987, blowing up in 1998, writing to his readers to “Get Out Now!” within minutes of the bottom on October 8th (when his fund was essentially insolvent, but the banks who lent him the money didn’t know it yet (and never would).  Cramer is brutally honest, and describes his 16 year career with aplomb.  This is must reading for anyone wanting to understand how Wall Street, and running money, works.

The Road to Serfdom (1944) By Friedrich A Hayek
This is Hayek’s seminal work, written with the backdrop of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, at each other’s throats.  Two equally tyrannical regimes, both whose demise is written into moral disconduct of their intellectual mandate.  The stock market is based on broad and wide trust of institutions, government and people.  The antithesis of the trust required for capital markets to function, is the distrust of authoritarian and socialist regimes, which denigrate the sanctity of contract and the individual, equally.  The greatest accomplishment of the 20th century, is that we have seemingly made Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” out of date.  Now if only that could really be true.

The Rational Optomist (2010) by Matt Ridley
Ridley is a zoologist turned economist.  He was chief science editor at the Economist magazine for 8 years, and his evolution from skeptical academic, to an embracing optomist of humanity, is eye opening.  As Ridley points out, he didn’t start this way, but the evidence of his life experience, has turned him into an optomist.  Reading Optomist, shines a more proper historical context on many things, both economic, anthropological, and otherwise.  A very solid good read, at least the first 100+ pages.

Why the West Won -

Capitalism 4.0