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The Best Investing Books: A List of Key Reads for Building Wealth

"Readers occasionally ask me what I think the best investing books are, or what I recommend reading.

The truth is, while I’ve read a lot of investing books and there are tons of good ones, the most powerful resources I’ve found are online.

Compared to other things I’ve read, the free writings of billionaire investors have been the most useful. Who better to learn from than the people who have done it the best?

However, reading collections of online publications can be kind of tedious, especially since it’s hard to know which pieces are timeless and which ones are specific, since they often write on timely events.

Fortunately, some of those writings have been compiled into books. Those, I guess, are what I consider the best investing books to read. 🙂" – Lyn Alden

Marks often found himself in a client’s office saying, “the most important thing is to manage risk.” And then as the conversation would continue he would say, “the most important thing is knowing where we are in the cycle.”

He humorously kept finding himself saying, “the most important thing is…” because the truth is, there are so many important things to get right when investing.

Each chapter in this book is one of those most important things, as a collection of separate lessons. It’s useful for investors in all asset classes; stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. The strategies are timeless and broadly applicable.

A fundamental theme of Dalio is that most recessions and financial crises are driven by the debt cycle.

The first 60 pages or so of his book serve as a highly-accessible summary of how debt crises tend to play out, based on statistics of dozens of instances from the past.

Then, the rest of the book drills down into detail on specific crises as examples. Will a recession be inflationary or deflationary? What policies are likely to resolve it? Dalio shows the historical answers to those questions based on the type of crisis it is.

Joel Greenblatt is one of the highest-performing value investors around, and this simple book gives an accessible outline of his formula.
This later edition of the book updates it and adds the word “still” to the title to separate it from the original edition.

It’s not an investing book, but The Lessons of History is one of the most important books for long-term investors to read, in my opinion.
If condenses 5,000 years of human history into 100 pages of key lessons, including key chapters on long-term socio-economic cycles.

StockDelver will be of use to you, if you like investing in individual stocks.
It’s a PDF book that comes with a set of Excel spreadsheets for stock valuation, and thousands of investors find it useful in their endeavors.