2019 Wall Street Reading List

The first full account of Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies, the code breaker and math professor whose Medallion fund produced the best long-run record in investing. Zuckerman shows how a team of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists, not Wall Street veterans, turned pattern-finding in market data into a money machine.

Blackstone's co-founder tells how he and Pete Peterson turned $400,000 in 1985 into the world's largest alternative asset manager, and what he learned about deals, risk and building a firm along the way. It is a founder's view of how modern private equity and real estate investing were built, from a hard first fundraise to the 2007 IPO.

The Fed chairman, the New York Fed president and the Treasury secretary who ran the 2008 rescue look back together, ten years on, at why the crisis happened, what stopped it, and which emergency tools the next crisis-fighters will be missing. It is the shortest serious account of the crisis from the people who made the calls, with a long appendix of charts.

Winner of the 2019 FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, this is a catalog of how data that treats men as the default produces products, workplaces, medicine and policy that fail half the population. For analysts and investors, it is a sharp lesson in sampling bias: when a dataset leaves people out, every model built on it inherits the gap.

Nobel laureate Robert Shiller argues that popular stories, from Bitcoin hype to Depression-era thrift to fears that machines will take every job, spread like epidemics and move spending, investment and prices. It is a framework for investors who suspect that the story behind a market moves prices as much as the numbers do.

A Vanity Fair writer's history of how a few dealers turned contemporary art from a postwar backwater into a global, lightly regulated market for the very rich. Read it to see how pricing works when there is no exchange: dealers make the market, auctions set the marks, and the trading mostly happens in private.

A physicist turned biotech CEO argues that organizations reject great ideas because of their structure, not their culture, and that small changes to incentives and team design can flip a firm from innovating to stagnating, the way water suddenly freezes. Investors judging whether a company can keep inventing will find a practical framework here.

Malcolm Gladwell uses cases from Bernie Madoff to the CIA's Cuban double agents to Sandra Bland's fatal traffic stop to argue that people trust by default and are bad at reading strangers. For finance readers, the Madoff material and the idea of default to truth explain why frauds last so long and why gut-feel due diligence fails.

The New York Times reporter who broke many of Uber's worst stories tells how Travis Kalanick built the company by ignoring regulators and rules, and how the same culture got him forced out by his own investors in 2017. A close study of founder control, growth at any cost and what venture capital tolerates while the valuation keeps rising.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff argues that Google, and then Facebook and others, built a new kind of capitalism: they take personal data as a free raw material and sell predictions of what people will do. For anyone valuing ad-driven platforms, it is the most influential critique of how those business models make money and why regulators target them.

A deeply reported history of Koch Industries, the private conglomerate Charles Koch built out of a Wichita pipeline and refining business. Christopher Leonard shows how the company learned to profit from volatility, information and patience, and how the same mindset shaped its political machine. It ranks among the best books ever written about an American company.

Simon Sinek borrows James Carse's distinction between finite games, played to win, and infinite games, played to keep playing, and argues that companies run for quarterly wins wear themselves out. It is a leadership book rather than a finance book, but its attack on shareholder primacy and short-term incentives speaks directly to how markets reward management.

David Epstein challenges the idea that success requires an early start and narrow specialization. Drawing on sports, science, music and business, he argues that in messy fields with slow, misleading feedback, broad experience and late specialization usually win. Anyone who forecasts markets or hires analysts should take that seriously.