Wiley Finance, 2014 [Equity Investing] Grade 4
Hopefully this book can do for corporate culture and creating value what William Thorndike’s Outsiders did for share buybacks and “value creation”. For those of you with a high degree of Warren Buffett-nausea, please keep reading! If Larry Cunningham’s The Essays of Warren... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Picador, 2009, [Surrounding Knowledge] Grade 4
In all professions experts face a rise in complexity due to increased domain knowledge. The traditional answer has been to specialize into an ever-smaller niche to be able to keep the expert status. Besides creating the undesirable second order consequence that too few have the... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Prentice Hall, 2011, [Business] Grade 3
Who wouldn’t want the tool to solve business problems? The British-Mexican Antonio Weiss has a varied and interesting history. With an academic background as an historian of the state and religion he moved on to become a management consultant doing work for the UK public sector... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Penguin Group, 2009, [Business] Grade 2
As any newspaper publisher knows people love top lists. This entire book is a top list of business books. Jack Covert who is the founder of the business book retailer 800-CEO-READS and publisher of “Jack Covert Reads” has read and reviewed business literature for several decades... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Columbia University Press, 2014, [Equity Investing] Grade 4
This book wants to be taken seriously – and it should. The ambition is grand and the author is innovative. Nick Gogerty could perhaps easiest be described as a serial entrepreneur within technology and finance. He’s a private strategist working for leading hedge funds, banks and... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2003, [Surrounding Knowledge] Grade 2
In his last year as an advertising agency executive, James Webb Young was taking an apparently urgent meeting with a client at a well-known magazine. It turned out that the magazine had decided that their future strategy should be to “sell ideas”. However, after that they got stuck... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
John Wiley & Sons, 2013, [Equity Investing] Grade 4
This Book is not like anyone you have read before. Mark Spitznagel builds a mosaic of philosophy, history, economics, military strategy, psychology and more to end up with a loose framework for equity investing that could serve as a practical sequel to Nassim N. Taleb’s Antifragile. Indeed... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Allen Lane, 2014, [Equity Investing] Grade 4
It is usually the sign of a good book if it ignites heated debate between its detractors and its supporters. Equally, it is the sign of a good book if it was written by Michael Lewis. This book delivers superbly on all promises. Lewis, who needs no introduction after smash hits such as... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Wiley, 2003, [Equity Investing] Grade 3
Reading Financial Fine Print takes me down memory lane to the early noughties when this reviewer – deemed “a sceptic and perma-bear” – created several “Black Lists” consisting of companies with multiple red flags in minefields like pension debt, option schemes, goodwill... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
HarperCollins Publishers, 2013, [Behavioural Finance] Grade 3
We don’t know what makes for a successful investor or the key to happiness, however we do know what does not. In the words of Warren Buffett: “Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them”. The method of illuminating... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
The MIT Press, 2000, [Equity Investing] Grade 3
A central guidepost of finance is that an investor that is better informed than the others can generate returns higher than the less knowledgeable. The investor with the ultimate level of corporate specific knowledge is the corporate insider. The objective of this book is to determine... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Penguin Books, 2013, [Economics] Grade 4
Authoritarian state capitalism à la China is on the rise while the democratic, economically liberal societies seam to be in a dead end. In this book Niall Ferguson, a Scottish born Harvard professor of history, examines the underlying reasons for the stagnation of the Western World. The... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2009, [Equity Investing] Grade 4
Forecasting is hard. Skilled financial forecasting with inadequate tools is even harder. This book supplies the tools; that is, it supplies the structure of the Excel-designs used to try to model a company’s financial future and the DCF used to assess its intrinsic value. John Tjia for a very... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Free Press 2007, [Equity Investing], Grade 4
Recently, there was an article about Chinese IPOs in a Shanghai newspaper. The writer spoke to Yan Ding, head of Ceibs Research Center in Shanghai about the merits of investing in the avalanche of IPOs coming the market’s way this year. “If somebody asks me whether to invest... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
McGraw-Hill, 2011, [Business] Grade 3
In the popular debate there is a growing consensus that short-termism in financial markets is a big problem. Is this actually the case? – And if so, what can be done about it? Alfred Rappaport, one of the founding fathers of what’s been dubbed the Shareholder Value Model and author... Further Reading... Link to Amazon...
Crown Business, 1991, [Business] Grade 3
In the early 1970’s Royal Dutch Shell formed a unit called Group Planning. Lead by Pierre Wack this group made scenario planning a part of the strategic process in the company. When OPEC caught the rest of the world by surprise by declaring an oil embargo in 1973, Shell was mentally... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Crown Business, 2014, [Business] Grade 5
From Zero to One is the brilliant title of Peter Thiel’s new book on innovation and startups. He argues that we have only focused on “globalization” (taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere) or 1 → n for the last 40 years or so. I have to agree, and we all... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Pocket Books, 1st edition 1999 – paperback edition 2007, [Business] Grade 3
This is a book from the recent past about the future of marketing. With remarkable foresight the entrepreneur, Internet guru and author Seth Godin in 1997, when he wrote this book, foresaw the change in marketing practices that some in the profession still struggle to understand. In some... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
Butterworth Heinemann, 2002, [Business] Grade 2
This is an over ten-year-old book on a subject – relationship marketing - that has grown in importance with the spreading of the Internet, e-commerce and of what’s become know as “big data”. Evert Gummesson is Professor Emeritus of Service Marketing and Management at the... Further Reading... Link to Amazon...
Portfolio Penguin, 2012 [Equity Investing] Grade 3
Last month, one of the most influential business journalists of our time decided it was time to hang up the pen. Carol J. Loomis, the longest-tenured journalist ever at Fortune Magazine (60 years!) was recently described as the business writer combination of Cal Ripken Jr (durability... Further reading... Link to Amazon...
