This past month we had two book-related posts up including “Eliminating distractions and becoming a star in your field” inspired by Cal Newport’ Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and “Three proven steps to ‘instant alpha‘ inspired by Robert H. Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. You can also check out the previous edition of this linkfest, or our latest monthly (July) post of the most popular books among Abnormal Returns readers. Remember anything you buy from Amazon through these links goes to support the site. Enjoy!
Finance
Book Q&A: Spencer Jakab author of Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tile the Odds In Your Favor talks about the high cost of being out of the market. (ETF)
Book Q&A: Sam Polk author of For the Love of Money on the glaring lack of self-awareness on Wall Street. (The Atlantic)
Book review: Higher Probability Commodity Trading by Carley Garner is not for novices. (Reading the Markets)
Book list: 17 books the CEO of Jefferies recommends to interns including The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. (Yahoo Finance)
Book notes: Yefei Lu’s Inside the Investments of Warren Buffett: Twenty Cases takes a case study approach to Berkshire Hathaway. (Reading the Markets)
Book Q&A: A discussion with Edgar Wachenheim III author of Common Stocks & Common Sense: The Strategies, Analyses, Decisions and Emotions of a Particularly Successful Value Investor. (Latticework)
Book review: The best book of the financial crisis is Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud by David Dayen. (The Baseline Scenario)
Book list: Understanding Fed speak including Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. (Bloomberg)
Book review: Derivatives Essentials: An Introduction to Forwards, Futures, Options, and Swaps by Aron Gottesman is an excellent textbook/self-study guide. (Reading the Markets)
Book review: Josh Brown loves the new take on Jesse Livemore – Boy Plunger: The Man Who Sold America Short in 1929 by Tom Rubython. (The Reformed Broker)
Book excerpt: The case for indexing from Charlie Ellis’ The Index Revolution: Why Investors Should Join It Now. (Institutional Investor)
Book review: So You Want To Start A Hedge Fund by Ted Seides “offers a very high insights-gleaned to time-spent ratio.” (Market Folly)
Non-finance
Book review: Our systems have become too complicated to de-bug per Samuel Arbesman author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension. (WSJ)
Book notes: Why we should think of our bodies as a big bag of micro organisms. Insights from Rodney Dietert’s new book, The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome Is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life. (Pacific Standard)
Book excerpt: from Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. (New Yorker)
Book review: Antonio Garcia Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley is “more than worth plowing through..” (Lefsetz Letter)
Book Q&A: How to procrastinate better with Charles Duhigg author of Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. (The Atlantic)
Book notes: Five ways your brain fools you. Insights from Dean Burnett’s The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To. (National Post)
Book review: Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman is “fascinating an full of new ideas.” (FT)
Book list: what we are reading this summer including Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. (The Atlantic)
Book review: Another rave review for the “surprisingly well-written” memoir by Phil Knight, Shoe Dog. (Value and Opportunity)
Book list: The Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award for 2016 long list is out and includes Brazillionaires by Alex Cuadros. (FT)
Book review: Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller lifts the veil on this secretive industry. (NYTimes)
Book review: Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez is a “book about the human side of the Valley.” (TechCrunch)
Book review:Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything is a “savvy and engaging” look at the last great sitcom. (WSJ)
Please check in with us on September 1st when we highlight the best-selling books on the site from August.
