Book Reviews From Credit Bubble Stocks
5/5 - These Are "Must Read"
- Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip by Peter Hessler
- The Farming Game by Bryan Jones
- The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
- The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery
- Security Analysis: Sixth Edition, Foreword by Warren Buffett
- Conquer the Crash: You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression (Second Edition) by Robert R. Prechter, Jr.
- Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago
- Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
- Distressed Debt Analysis: Strategies for Speculative Investors by Stephen Moyer
- The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu [movie]
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre [movie]
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler [4.5]
- Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner
- Seeds of Wealth: Five Plants That Made Men Rich by Henry Hobhouse
- Traders, Guns and Money by Satyajit Das
- The Fundamentals of Municipal Bonds, 5th Edition
- Viking Raid: A Robert Fairchild Novel by Matthew McCleery
- The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman
- A Colossal Failure of Common Sense by Lawrence McDonald
- Last Train Home [movie]
- Review of Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life?
- Wilder Shores of Marx
- Review of The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson
- Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin
- Investment Fables: Exposing the Myths of "Can't Miss" Investment Strategies by Aswath Damodaran
- The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham: Selected Writings of the Wall Street Legend by Janet Lowe
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets
- The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies by Edward Jay Epstein
- The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
- Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview [movie]
- Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan [3.5]
- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick [3.5]
- How to be a Billionaire: Proven Strategies from the Titans of Wealth by Martin Fridson
- Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
- An Economist Gets Lunch by Tyler Cowen
- Bankruptcy, Credit Risk, and High Yield Junk Bonds by Edward Altman
- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
- The 12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson
- Review of Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline by Theodore Dalrymple
- William Tecumseh Sherman: Gold Rush Banker by D. E Clarke
- The Gold Rush Letters of E. Allen Grosh and Hosea B. Grosh
- Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
- The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
- The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow
- The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough
- Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager
- Corporate Financial Distress and Bankruptcy: Predict and Avoid Bankruptcy, Analyze and Invest in Distressed Debt , 3rd Edition by Edward Altman
- Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession: The Early Writings of the Father of Security Analysis
- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Taleb
- American Railroads as Investments by Salomon Frederik van Oss
- Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
- The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
- Risk Arbitrage by Guy Wyser-Pratte
- Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper by Robert Bryce
- The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail —but Some Don't by Nate Silver
- As I See It: The Autobiography of J. Paul Getty
- Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb
- Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938 by John Brooks
- There's Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach
- Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom by Brian Black
- Extreme Value Hedging: How Activist Hedge Fund Managers Are Taking on the World
- No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets by Michael Steinhardt
- The Outsiders by William Thorndike
- Inside Job [movie]
- W's Awful New Book
- Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

6 comments:
thx.
Just picked up Country Driving and Shipping Man off amazon.
Hopefully they are as good as yyou say.
Re: your review of The Outsiders, I think you might have been too harsh. Meant to mention this when you reviewed it but figured I missed the window, so will comment here. I took the book as much less ambitious than you did and therefore was not looking for scientific rigor. Is it academically robust? No. Is there survivorship bias? Of course! Does it give short shrift to the importance of a good underlying business? Yes. (John Malone recognized that the cable biz was incredible. Once that incredibly valuable insight was in place, it made it straightforward to be a “good capital allocator”. So cause and effect might be confused here). And yes, one can certainly, and many probably will, learn the wrong lesson – just lever up and buy everything in sight and all will be well!
But I don’t think you would disagree with this: capital allocation matters and a surprisingly large number of CEO’s don’t have a clue about capital allocation.
P.S. I've enjoyed your book reviews, including the one on the outsiders.
Re: your review of The Outsiders, I think you might have been too harsh. Meant to mention this when you reviewed it but figured I missed the window, so will comment here. I took the book as much less ambitious than you did and therefore was not looking for scientific rigor.
When people criticize The Outsiders, I think they're criticizing more than just the book. They're also commenting on various psychological mistakes that investors make: survivorship bias, hindsight bias, hero worship, etc. Since The Outsiders receives fulsome praise from the kind of people who make those mistakes, it becomes a stand-in for them.
But the book itself is nothing special. In addition to its methodological flaws, it lacks any useful detail: it's essentially eight magazine profiles of successful CEOs, and the profiles offer nothing that readers can't find elsewhere.
Boobies.
Magazine profiles is the perfect description.
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