2015 Wall Street Reading List

Philip Tetlock, who showed that most experts forecast barely better than chance, and journalist Dan Gardner report on the Good Judgment Project, where ordinary volunteers beat the field in a U.S. intelligence forecasting tournament. The book explains how the best forecasters think, and how investors can measure and improve their own probabilistic judgment.

Richard Thaler, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics, tells how behavioral economics went from a list of oddities to the mainstream. He covers the endowment effect, mental accounting, stock-market overreaction, closed-end fund discounts and the negative-value Palm stub. For investors it is the most readable first-hand case against the idea that prices are always right.

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Ashlee Vance's 2015 biography follows Elon Musk from a bruising South African childhood through Zip2, PayPal and the 2008 crisis that nearly sank SpaceX and Tesla at once. It is the best account of how Musk raised money, took risk and drove engineers in the years before he became the world's richest man.

Two former SEAL officers who led Task Unit Bruiser through the 2006 battle of Ramadi turn their combat lessons into a leadership manual. Each principle gets a battlefield story, a plain statement and a business case. Its core claim is that a leader owns every outcome on the team, with no excuses, and that applies as much to a deal team or trading desk as to a platoon.

Bill Browder built Hermitage Capital into one of the largest foreign investors in Russia by buying cheap privatized shares and fighting corrupt managers, until the Kremlin expelled him, seized his companies and imprisoned his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in custody. Part investing memoir, part thriller, it is a sharp lesson in emerging-market and political risk.

Thomas Piketty's short textbook, first written in French in 1997 and translated after the success of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, explains how economists measure inequality, why capital income is more concentrated than wages, and which tools of redistribution actually work. A compact, numerate primer for readers who want the framework without 700 pages.