2014 Wall Street Reading List
2014 WSRL
The best books on business and markets first published in 2014: Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Michael Lewis on high-frequency trading, Ben Horowitz on running a company through a crisis, Peter Thiel on monopoly, Tobias Carlisle on deep value and activism, Ed Catmull on Pixar, and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens.
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1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz · 2014EssentialBen Horowitz's account of keeping Loudcloud alive through the dot-com crash, selling its services arm to EDS and rebuilding it as Opsware, which HP bought for $1.6 billion in 2007. It's a manual for the parts of running a company that MBA courses skip: layoffs, firing executives, wartime leadership and deciding whether to sell.
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2. Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty · 2014RecommendedPiketty's data-heavy history of wealth and income over three centuries argues that when the return on capital outruns economic growth, inherited fortunes pull away from everyone else. For anyone who owns, manages or prices capital, it is the book that framed the modern inequality debate, and its numbers and critics are both worth knowing.
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3. Deep Value Tobias E. Carlisle · 2014RecommendedTobias Carlisle traces deep value investing from Benjamin Graham's net-nets through Carl Icahn's raids to modern activist funds, then tests what actually works. His argument: cheap, unloved stocks beat good businesses at fair prices because mean reversion is stronger than most investors assume, and activists are the catalyst that forces the gap to close.
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4. Flash Boys Michael Lewis · 2014RecommendedMichael Lewis follows RBC trader Brad Katsuyama as he works out why the prices on his screen vanish the moment he tries to trade, and traces the answer to high-frequency traders who profit from being microseconds faster. It is the book that put market structure, dark pools and the founding of IEX in front of a general audience.
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5. Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace · 2014Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, writing with journalist Amy Wallace, explains how the studio went from a money-losing hardware company backed by Steve Jobs to the maker of Toy Story and Finding Nemo, and what management habits kept its films good. A practical book on candor, failure and protecting new ideas inside a growing company.
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6. Zero to One Peter Thiel and Blake Masters · 2014Highly recommendedPayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel argues that real value comes from building something new, not copying what works, and that the best businesses escape competition to become monopolies. Built from his 2012 Stanford startup class, it is a short, contrarian guide to how venture investors think about moats, power laws and founders.
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7. Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari · 2014RecommendedHistorian Yuval Noah Harari's sweep from the Stone Age to genetic engineering argues that humans came to dominate the planet because they can cooperate around shared fictions such as gods, nations, companies and money. Not a finance book, but its chapters on money as trust and capitalism as a belief in growth give investors a useful long view.