● The Humble Investor: How to find a winning edge in a surprising world
Daniel Rasmussen
Interview with author via Bloomberg
Financial forecasting is a mainstay of finance and economics. Banks use them to analyze how well a company should be doing a few years from now; governments use them to set their budgets. But how often are those prognostications—on which so much depends— actually accurate? Not very often, according to Daniel Rasmussen, founder of Verdad Advisers, author of The Humble Investor: How to Find a Winning Edge in a Surprising World and guest on this week’s episode of Merryn Talks Money.

● Inertia: Purposeful Inefficiencies in Financial Markets
Yuval Millo, et al.
Summary via publisher (Columbia U. Press)
Financial professionals are paid as if they were capable of “beating the market” on a regular basis. In fact, active fund managers routinely underperform low-cost index funds, and financial analysts frequently produce inaccurate stock recommendations—and many receive large fees even when their clients are losing money. Why do financial intermediaries still persist in the investing world despite this track record? Economic theory, obsessed with notions of market efficiency, has no good answer.

● Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles
Mike Colias
Summary via publisher (Harvard Business Review Press)
The question is no longer if electric vehicles will happen, or even when they’ll happen, but how. Veteran automotive reporter Mike Colias takes you inside the transformation in this thoroughly reported profile of the hard pivot in the car business, a $2 trillion industry undergoing the biggest change in its 120-year history–a change that is already sending ripples across the entire global economy. Colias documents the inevitable shift from pistons to electrons from every angle, taking you inside the boardrooms where executives battle over their EV strategies to take on Tesla and, more recently, emerging Chinese powerhouses such as BYD.

● Source Code: My Beginnings
Bill Gates
Review via The Wall Street Journal
We cling to tidy success narratives—appealing stories that trace an outsize triumph to a single critical decision, a vital personality trait, a striking incident from childhood. Such stories make extraordinary success seem comprehensible, perhaps (we imagine) even attainable. Yet reality tends to be more complicated. At a certain level of achievement, success is unfathomably contingent, requiring a hefty amount of luck on top of remarkable ability and durable conviction. In “Source Code,” Bill Gates’s chronicle of his early years, we are treated to an unexpectedly revealing account of the swirl of factors leading to the birth of Microsoft and the ascent of personal computing.

● The Professional’s Guide to Long-Term Investing: What to Buy, When to Sell, and the Factors Every Investment Manager Ought to Consider
Charles F. Pohl
Summary via publisher (Amplify Publishing Group)
From the former chairman and chief investment officer of storied mutual fund management firm Dodge & Cox—the ultimate guide to professional long-term investing. There are no easy answers to achieving investment success. But for professional investors, there are fundamentals that can help you consistently make good decisions that you can firmly stand behind and increase the likelihood of consistent high returns. In the spirit of the classic The Little Book of Common Sense Investing but tailored to the needs of fund managers and analysts at all levels, former Dodge & Cox chairman and CIO Charles Pohl reveals the core insights and strategies that helped steer the company to the greatest performance record among its peers over any long-term period.

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