2021 Wall Street Reading List

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio studies five centuries of rising and falling empires, including the Dutch, the British, the Americans and now the Chinese. He argues that debt, money printing, internal conflict and great-power rivalry move in a long, repeating cycle. This is his macro investor's framework for reading the 2020s and positioning a portfolio for a shift in reserve-currency power.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein argue that random scatter in professional judgment does as much damage as bias and gets far less attention. Underwriters, judges, doctors and recruiters given the same case reach wildly different answers. For anyone who prices risk, rates credits or hires analysts, the book offers a way to measure that noise and reduce it.

A wealth manager's field guide to alternatives, written for advisers who suspect the 60/40 portfolio will not deliver what it used to. Phil Huber covers private equity, alternative risk premia, catastrophe reinsurance, real assets, private credit and digital assets, then shows how to choose fund structures, size the positions and keep clients invested when diversifiers lag.

The inside story of the fight over Caesars Entertainment after Apollo and TPG's roughly $30 billion buyout went bad. The private equity owners used aggressive financial engineering to protect their stake, distressed-debt funds fought back in court, and the 2015 Chapter 11 case became one of the most contested restructurings of the era. It is a working education in how creditor fights are won and lost.

Two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered the company tell the full story of Adam Neumann's office-subletting company. It reached a $47 billion private valuation on SoftBank's money and lost most of it when its 2019 IPO filing went public. The book is a case study in what happens when cheap capital, founder control and a tech-company story meet real estate economics.

Two Bloomberg reporters tell the history of the independent commodity traders, including Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Marc Rich's firm, who move the world's oil, metals and grain. The book shows how a few lightly regulated firms profited from oil nationalizations, the Soviet collapse and China's boom, and how they gained political power along the way.

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant argues that the skill that matters most is not thinking but rethinking: noticing when you are wrong and updating. He shows how to do it yourself, how to change other people's minds and how to build teams that question their own assumptions, a discipline every investor holding a losing thesis needs.

A three-generation history of the Sackler family, from Arthur Sackler's pioneering drug advertising to Purdue Pharma's marketing of OxyContin and the legal maneuvers that protected the family fortune. For finance readers, it is a study in how a private, family-controlled company priced in legal risk, captured regulators and kept its name on museum walls for decades.

A longtime senior IMF tax official and a leading University of Michigan public-finance economist use thousands of years of tax history to teach the economics of taxation, from Britain's window tax and Peter the Great's beard tax to corporate inversions and the Panama Papers. It is the most entertaining way to learn who really bears a tax and how people and companies change their behavior to avoid it.

Bloomberg Businessweek's Max Chafkin wrote the first major biography of Peter Thiel: PayPal co-founder, Facebook's first outside investor, Palantir co-founder, Founders Fund partner, and funder of the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker and of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. It is a critical account of how venture money and a contrarian worldview turned into political power.

Two Wall Street Journal reporters reconstruct the rise and collapse of Abraaj Group, the Dubai private equity firm whose founder, Arif Naqvi, raised money from the Gates Foundation, the World Bank's IFC and Western governments by promising profits and poverty relief at once. It is a case study in how an impact story can disarm due diligence.

Michael Lewis tells the story of the Covid-19 response through a handful of doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming and tried to act while the CDC and the White House stalled. It is not a finance book, but it is Lewis's familiar study of outsiders who read the data correctly and institutions that would not listen, applied to the largest tail risk of the decade.

The New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth investigates the secret market for zero-day exploits, software flaws that governments buy from hackers and stockpile as weapons. She traces how American spending built that market and how those weapons were later turned against the US and its allies. The book won the 2021 Financial Times Business Book of the Year award.

The Financial Times's global finance correspondent tells the history of passive investing, from Louis Bachelier's random walk and the Chicago efficient-market school to Wells Fargo's first index fund, Jack Bogle's Vanguard, the ETF and BlackRock's iShares. It ends by asking what happens when a handful of index giants own a big share of every company.

An entrepreneur's introduction to René Girard's theory of mimetic desire: the idea that we learn what to want by copying models, and that rivalry, bubbles and scapegoating follow. Girard's ideas shaped Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor. For finance readers, the book explains herd behavior in markets and careers, and how to choose goals that are your own.

Brad Stone's sequel to The Everything Store covers Amazon's decade from 2010 to the pandemic: Alexa, the Fire phone, AWS, the third-party marketplace, the last-mile delivery network, advertising, Whole Foods, HQ2 and the antitrust backlash. For investors it is the most detailed reported account of how Bezos built the company's operating leverage.

Two New York Times reporters reconstruct Facebook's years between the 2016 and 2020 elections: Russian interference, Cambridge Analytica, misinformation and the January 6 Capitol riot. They show how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg's push for growth and advertising revenue kept winning out over safety. It is a close study of governance and key-person risk at one of the world's most valuable companies.

Universa Investments founder Mark Spitznagel argues that a hedge is worth owning only if it raises a portfolio's compound growth rate, not just its comfort. Using Bernoulli's math, simple wagers and bootstrapped S&P 500 returns, he tests bonds, gold, trend following and tail insurance, and finds most popular safe havens too expensive to hold.

An Andreessen Horowitz partner and former Uber growth executive breaks network effects into five stages, from the first small atomic network to the moat. The examples come from Uber, Slack, Dropbox and others. Venture and growth-equity investors get a working vocabulary for judging whether a platform's network will hold up or stall.

William Bernstein revisits Charles Mackay's 1841 classic on financial and religious manias and brings it up to date with neuroscience and behavioral psychology. The book runs from the Münster Anabaptists and the South Sea Bubble to the dot-com boom and modern end-times movements, and explains why a good story so often beats the facts in markets.

New York Times Your Money columnist Ron Lieber explains how colleges actually set prices, why the sticker price is often fiction, and how merit aid works as a discount used to win students. It is the clearest consumer guide to a purchase that can cost nearly $350,000 at a top school, and it treats tuition as an investment decision with a price, a return and room to negotiate.