Finance Books In One Sentence Or Less (or More)

Some books can be compressed to one sentence without loss of much information. Not saying that the books included here can be shortened to half a sentence, or even just one word, without loss of substance, but this is what we did: A highly densed compression of financial litterature.

Very Short Summaries of Business- and Finance Books

These are some key takeaways or short summaries of popular finance and business books, and some less known books related to finance, trading, investing, business.

• The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham, 1949). Value Investing (targets undervalued stocks with long run potential). Mr. Market (an allegory meant to personify the irrationality and group-think of the stock market). If you are an value investor, read the book from cover to cover.
• A Man for All Markets (Edward O. Thorp, 2018). From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market. In one word two words: Index funds. Summary: Read the book, interesting stories (or look up interviews of Thorp).
• The Richest Man in Babylon (George S. Clason, 1926). Save 10%, compound investments and be patient (long-term thinking). Control expenditures and guard from loss. Also: Make sure you have a pension and future retirement income.
• How to Get Rich (Felix Dennis, 2006). Alternative title: How to spend over $100 million on drugs and women. Btw, $100 million is the definition of truly rich, according to Dennis, 2x this and you're filthy rich. Honest and full of anecdotes, read it in a couple of hours for entertainment. Summary: If you want to get rich, get busy getting rich.
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (scottish journalist Charles Mackay, 1841): Anectdotes illustrating the delusions of people, like the Mississippi Scheme, South Sea Bubble, Tulip mania, Admiration for Great Thieves. Summary: A reminder that humans in groups can act delusional.
• How To Trade In Stocks (Jesse Livermore, 1940). Learn how one man traded stocks like a God, got rich and bought $ROPE.
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich (2009, Ramit Sethi). Index funds, buy'em if you're lazy (or lifecycle funds if you are super-lazy). Dated. Advice for US citizens mostly. Also, misleading title.
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (John C. Bogle). Dividend yields and earnings growth, compounding, compounding, compounding, index investing.
• Hot Commodities (Jim Rogers). Creator of the RICI (Rogers International Commodities Index) show us how to invest in commodities, because the place to be is in commodities.
• Economics in one lesson (Henry Hazlitt, 1946). Austrian Economics, in more than one lesson.
• Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith, 1776). An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Cannot be summarized in any length. Read. The. Book.
• The Misbehavior of Markets, A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (Benoit Mandelbrot). Markets are riskier than you think, modern finance theory is BS and a global threat. Prices are not random. Timing the market is NOT a fools game. No such thing as bedrock in investing. TA is meaningless. Read. The. Book.
• Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton G. Malkiel). It's all random, guys. Both technical analysis and fundamental analysis has significant flaws and will yield inferior results for most investors.
• The Innovators Dilemma (Clayton Christensen, 1997). There is an disincentive to jump into new, emerging markets, although these markets have better long term risk/reward than established markets. Disruptive technology (DT) disrupts the success of sucessful companies, and this is why you place disruptive technology in independent suborganizations, i.e. create a separate, autonomous operation for your DT. Fail early, fail often, to find DT. Investing in DT may cause short term loss, but not doing so might lag and downfall a company (pay a little now, or pay a lot later).
  
• Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely). The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Summary in two words: It's in the title. We underestimate social norms, emotion, relativity and other behavior-altering forces. Our decisions are not reality-based (our mind and our biological senses does not reflect reality). Solution? 1) Learn to recognize when and where faulty desicions are made, and 2) re-think or use tech to overcome our irrational nature.
  
• Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner). Bunch of entertaining articles on economics.
• The Disciplined Trader (Mark Douglas, 1990). (Video course starring Douglas is available on YouTube for free). In short: The market is not wrong. You are wrong. Control yourself, it is all that you can control. Being right is not always the same as making money, traders should opt for the latter.
• The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, 1883). Read the whole thing, once. No summary is a sufficient substitute.