Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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The Efficient Market Hypothesis

The claim that prices absorb available information fast enough that trading on it yields nothing after costs - a model with documented cracks in momentum, the value premium and crashes far too violent for its statistics. Use it as the null hypothesis: assume the price is right until you can name the structural reason it is not. It is why cheap index funds beat most managers, and why an edge you cannot articulate is not an edge.

Start here

  1. A Random Walk Down Wall StreetBurton G. Malkiel, 1973
  2. The Myth of the Rational MarketJustin Fox, 2009
  3. Adaptive MarketsAndrew W. Lo, 2017
Burton G. Malkiel · 1973

Stock prices follow a random walk, so a low-cost index fund beats stock picking.

Recommended by: Nat Eliason, Mohnish Pabrai

John C. Bogle · 2007

After costs, most investors trail the market, so hold a low-cost index fund.

Peter L. Bernstein · 1992

How Markowitz, Sharpe, Fama, Black and Scholes built the theory of modern finance.

Andrei Shleifer · 2000

“In his excellent book, Inefficient Markets, Andrei Shleifer describes the three arguments that comprise the theoretical foundation for market efficiency.” — Michael Mauboussin

Source: Capital Ideas Revisited (Legg Mason Capital Management)

Recommended by: Michael Mauboussin

Lasse Heje Pedersen · 2015

Markets pay skilled active managers; a survey of the strategies they run.

Philip Mirowski · 1989

How economics copied the maths of 19th-century physics, and what that cost it.

“there's a wonderful book called More Heat Than Light by a professor named Phil Mirowski, which documents how economists mapped over equations from Newtonian physics” — Michael Mauboussin

Source: The Tim Ferriss Show #659 — official transcript

Recommended by: Michael Mauboussin, Eric Weinstein

Turan G. Bali, Robert F. Engle, Scott Murray · 2016

The cross-sectional testing methods behind every factor claim.

John Y. Campbell, A. Craig MacKinlay · 1997

The statistical tools of empirical finance and the questions they test.

Perry Mehrling · 2005

Fischer Black's life and ideas, from option pricing on, that shaped modern finance.

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai

Donald MacKenzie · 2006

“his book An Engine Not a Camera (which I would highly recommend if you are interested in these topics)” — Michael Mauboussin

Source: The Wisdom and Whims of the Collective (Legg Mason Capital Management)

Recommended by: Michael Mauboussin

Elie Ayache · 2010

Philosophical treatment of contingency and the practice of option trading

Recommended by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Emanuel Derman · 2011

A quant on confusing models with reality, in finance and life

Recommended by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

James Owen Weatherall · 2013

How physicists and mathematicians came to run money; useful context for Simons.

Recommended by: Eric Weinstein

Matt Hall · 2016

Hall makes the evidence-based case for passive over active.

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