Personal finance books that teach the art of finance offer a great way of learning the ins and outs of finance. By reading a book, we consume a huge amount of research in a relatively short amount of time, and it is one of the best ways to improve our skills. Like most of you, my knowledge of personal finance is limited. However, I also want to live a comfortable and financially stable life. Now it comes down to how I can upgrade myself to build a knowledge arsenal which can help me in my personal finance journey.
Here I have compiled a list of books you must read.
Business Adventures
Author: John Brooks
This business classic written by longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks is an insightful and engaging look into corporate and financial life in America. Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. John Brook’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
Author: Philip A. Fisher
When Warren Buffett started as a portfolio manager, he was a Benjamin Graham acolyte. He would invest in dirt cheap stocks, hoping that some of them would turn around and compensate him for the losses in the rest. However, the results using this approach were not to his satisfaction. He then scoured for an alternative, and the man whose methods impressed him was Philip A Fisher, author of the book. In Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Fisher has outlined the essence of his approach to hunting for quality stocks. He calls it ‘scuttlebutt’, which basically means conducting detailed interviews with stakeholders, suppliers, customers, shareholders and employees and competitors about a company’s prospects.
4.The Little Book of Valuation
Author: Aswath Damodaran
This book is an accessible and intuitive guide to stock valuation. Valuation is at the heart of any investment decision, whether that decision is to buy, sell, or hold. In The Little Book of Valuation, expert Aswath Damodaran explains the techniques in language that any investors can understand, so you can make better investment decisions when reviewing stock research reports and engaging in independent efforts to value and pick stocks.
5. Beating the Street
Author: Peter Lynch
Legendary money manager Peter Lynch explains his own strategies for investing and offers advice for how to pick stocks and mutual funds to assemble a successful investment portfolio. An important key to investing, Lynch says, is to remember that stocks are not lottery tickets. There’s a company behind every stock and a reason companies and their stocks perform the way they do. In this book, Peter Lynch shows you how you can become an expert in a company and how you can build a profitable investment portfolio, based on your own experience and insights and on straightforward do-it-yourself research.
6. The Black Swan
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
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