● Empire of the Fund: The Way We Save Now
By William A. Birdthistle
Summary via publisher (Oxford University Press)
Empire of the Fund is an exposé and examination of the way we save now. With the rise of the 401(k) and demise of the pension, the United States has embarked upon the richest and riskiest experiment in our financial history. Over the next twenty years, nearly eighty million baby boomers will retire at a pace of ten thousand per day. The hypothesis of our experiment is that millions of ordinary, untrained, busy citizens can successfully manage trillions of dollars in a financial system dominated by wealthy, skilled, and powerful financial institutions, many of which have a record of treating individual investors shabbily.
● The Laws of Wealth: Psychology and the secret to investing success
By Daniel Crosby
Summary via publisher (Harriman House)
In The Laws of Wealth, psychologist and behavioral finance expert Daniel Crosby offers an accessible and applied take on a discipline that has long tended toward theory at the expense of the practical. Readers are treated to real, actionable guidance as the promise of behavioral finance is realised and practical applications for everyday investors are delivered. Crosby presents a framework of timeless principles for managing your behavior and your investing process. He begins by outlining ten rules that are the hallmarks of good investor behavior, including ‘Forecasting is for Weathermen’ and ‘If You’re Excited, It’s Probably a Bad Idea’. He then goes on to introduce a unique new taxonomy of behavioral investment risk that will enable investors and academics alike to understand behavioral risk in a newly coherent and complete way.
● Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
By Antonio Garcia Martinez
Review via Bloomberg
Unlike most founding narratives that flow out of the Valley, Chaos Monkeys dives into the unburnished, day-to-day realities: the frantic pivots, the enthusiastic ass-kissing, the excruciating internal politics. The monkeys in his title are actually software programs designed to wreak havoc on a computer system to test its resilience. But García uses the term as a metaphor to illustrate how successful disruption often comes as much from luck as from skill.
● Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior
By Jonah Berger
Summary via publisher (Simon & Schuster)
Jonah Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals. By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and how we can use this knowledge to make better-informed decisions and exercise more control over our own behavior.
