Reading List
Books Worth Reading
Uncertainty
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers
John Kay and Mervyn King
This is, bar none, the best description and analysis of the decision context that we find ourselves in every day, at any moment in the financial markets. How to think about that context? How to make decisions in that context?
Valuations: the “weighing” part of the market
The Intelligent Investor
Benjamin Graham
This guy was Warren Buffett’s teacher at Columbia. A great beginner’s level summary of “value investing”. Includes a wonderful section on what he calls “intelligent speculation.”
Quantitative investing; Relative Strength investing (a subset of technical analysis)
Muscular Portfolios
Brian Livingston
Market Cycle Analysis
All-Season Investor (technical analysis)
Pring
Trading with Intermarket Analysis (technical analysis)
John J. Murphy
Master the Cycle (NOT technical analysis)
Howard Marks
Eric Basmajian
(on Seeking Alpha)
One of the best macro-economists I’ve even found. On his subscription site, he provides weekly and monthly updates of all the critical macroeconomic variables, along with length commentary on various critical topics – like the housing market, like inflation, etc.
Adaptive Investing
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
Andrew W. Lo
A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street
Andrew W. Lo and A. Craig MacKinlay
Technical Analysis; Market Internals; etc: the “voting” part of the market
How to make money in Stocks
William O’Neill
Free Websites
Seeking Alpha (www.seekingalpha.com)
Good articles by intelligent people who are trying to beat the market. I make sure to read anything by the following – all of them have archived articles of their cyclical indicators back for years. They all clarify the difference between long-leading, short-leading, coincident, and lagging indicators. And they explain what that implies about what’s going to be happening and when. The “markets” (i.e. informed market participants) all use this information to try to anticipate the effects on various securities; that’s why people say “you can’t use the economy to anticipate the markets! The markets lead the economy!” This is mythologizing and anthropomorphizing “the market”. “The market” is people; and those people use this information to anticipate the economy and place their bets on those anticipations. You can too!
Acheron Insights
Eric Basmajian
New Deal Democrat
Hussman Funds (www.hussmanfunds.com)
John Hussman runs mutual funds at this site. What’s useful is the archives of his market commentary going back to the late 1990s. The core of his work is the measurement of the fair valuation or misevaluation of the stock market and what that implies.
Stock Charts (www.stockcharts.com)
This is the charting service I use. They have a free charting service, but the real power comes when you pay for a subscription.
Trading Economics (www.tradingeconomics.com)
Just about any economic series you can think of. And many you haven’t even imagined. Worldwide coverage.
Econ P.I. (www.econpi.com)
This is an fascinating site! The best picture of where we are in the economic cycle. A great place to start. It tracks and summarizes a sizeable list of economic indicators and charts the resulting “average” on a chart with four quadrants: Expanding, Declining, Contracting, and Recovery. These are rough indicators of where we are in the economic cycle – a critical piece of information!