2017 Wall Street Reading List

New Yorker writer Sheelah Kolhatkar follows the seven-year federal pursuit of Steven A. Cohen and SAC Capital, the hedge fund whose culture of edge shaded into black edge, Wall Street slang for inside information. The firm pleaded guilty and paid about $1.8 billion, but Cohen was never charged. It is the definitive account of modern insider trading and of what an information arms race does to a firm.

David Enrich's account of the Libor rate-rigging scandal, built around Tom Hayes, the awkward, brilliant yen derivatives trader at UBS and Citigroup who leaned on brokers and rival traders to nudge a benchmark behind trillions of dollars of loans and contracts. It shows how a flawed benchmark, bonus culture and lax oversight let manipulation become routine.

Sam Zell's blunt memoir of five decades buying what others were dumping: distressed property after the 1970s bust, rail cars, manufactured home communities, and the office empire he sold for $39 billion in 2007. It is a working lesson in downside analysis, replacement cost and contrarian timing, and it does not dodge the Tribune deal that went bankrupt.

Nick Bilton reconstructs how Ross Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian, built the Silk Road, a dark-web drug market paid in bitcoin, and how rival federal agents, two of them corrupt, raced to unmask him. A true-crime story that doubles as an early case study in crypto payments, anonymity and the limits of both.

A short, plain-spoken case for deep value: buy fair companies at wonderful prices, ranked by enterprise value to operating earnings. Carlisle tests the ratio against Greenblatt's Magic Formula, explains why high profits tend to fade, and traces the method from young Buffett to Icahn's raids and today's activist funds.

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio sets out the rules he used to build the world's biggest hedge fund, drawing on the 1982 call that nearly broke him. Part memoir, part operating manual, it explains radical transparency, believability-weighted decisions and his habit of turning mistakes into written rules, ideas that are widely debated across the investment industry.

MIT finance professor and quant fund founder Andrew Lo tries to settle the fight between efficient-market theorists and behavioral economists. Markets, he argues, are efficient in some environments and not others, because investors adapt and compete like species. It explains why strategies stop working, why crises spread so fast, and why risk premiums are not constant.