Reading List

Books that I have explored

These are some books that I have read. Mostly they are finance and investment-related books. I would recommend most of them for my students. 

“The Roadless Traveled” by M. Scott Peck —————-
“Life is difficult. This is a great truth … It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult–once we truly understand and accept it–then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Gail Gazelle, Everyday Resilience: A Practical Guide to Build Inner Strength and Weather Life’s Challenges
“To achieve resilience, we have to change our inner critic to an inner ally, and move from self-harshness to self-kindness.”
“Far from being a passive endurance of life’s tribulations, resilience is an active process you can choose to engage it. As we explore the key factors that cultivate resilience—connection, flexibility, perseverance, self-regulation, positivity, and self-care—you’ll gain clarity on the many choice points you have.”

“Feeling Good” by David Burns ——————

“Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz —————–
“If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice helps make it perfect.”
“Feelings of inferiority originate not so much from the facts or experiences, but from our conclusions regarding facts and our evaluation of experience.”
“Times will change for the better when you change.”
“If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.”
“Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.”
“You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search.”

“How to Stop Worrying and Start Living” by Dale Carnegie 
“the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today’s work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.”
“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”

“Quiet” by Susan Cain

“Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman
“While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
“Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”
“Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.”
“The skills of becoming happy turn out to be almost entirely different from the skills of not being sad, not being anxious, or not being angry.”
“Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.”
“The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors.
“Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.
“YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.”
“Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet march stalwartly on in the others.”
“First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.”
“Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.”
“Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.”
“Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.”
“Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:”
“The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.”
“pessimism is a risk factor for depression in just the same sense as smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer or being a hostile, hard-driving man is a risk factor for heart attack.”

“Flourish” by Martin Seligman
“I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.”

“The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris

“The Hope Circuit” by Martin Seligman

“The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity” by Norman Doidge
“Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.”
“If you want to lift a hundred pounds, you don’t expect to succeed the first time. You start with a lighter weight and work up little by little. You actually fail to lift a hundred pounds, every day, until the day you succeed. But it is in the days when you are exerting yourself that the growth is occurring.”
Random movements provide variation that leads to developmental breakthroughs. Monumental gains, Feldenkrais discovered, are made not by mechanical movement but by the opposite—random movements. Children learn to roll over, crawl, sit, and walk through experimentation. Most babies learn to roll over, for instance, when they follow something with their eyes that interests them, then follow it so far that, to their surprise, they roll over.”
“Neuroplasticity is the property of the brain that enables it to change its own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience.”

“Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth
“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”
“It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things:”
“as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.”
“…interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t…Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.”
“Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.”

“Thrive” by Ariana Huffington
Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
“Mindfulness is simply the ability to observe what our brain is doing while it’s doing it, without judgment.”

“Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence” by Anna Lembke
“Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.”
“The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain. ”
“The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”
“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to. The rewards of finding and maintaining balance are neither immediate nor permanent. They require patience and maintenance. We must be willing to move forward despite being uncertain of what lies ahead. We must have faith that actions today that seem to have no impact in the present moment are in fact accumulating in a positive direction, which will be revealed to us only at some unknown time in the future. Healthy practices happen day by day. My patient Maria said to me, “Recovery is like that scene in Harry Potter when Dumbledore walks down a darkened alley lighting lampposts along the way. Only when he gets to the end of the alley and stops to look back does he see the whole alley illuminated, the light of his progress.”
“But, there is a cost to medicating away every type of human suffering, and as we shall see, there is an alternative path that might work better: embracing pain.”
“Practicing mindfulness is something like observing the Milky Way. It demands that we see our thoughts and emotions as separate from us, and yet, simultaneously apart of us. Also the brain can do some pretty weird things, some of which are embarrassing, thus the importance of being without judgement. Reserving judgement is important to the practice of mindfulness because as soon as we start condemning what our brain is doing, eww, why would I be thinking about that, I’m a loser, I’m a freak – We stop being able to observe. Staying in the observer position is essential to getting to know our brains and ourselves in a new way.”
“Doctors and health care institutions are complicit in the medicalization of poverty that encourages the creation of professional patients.”
“any drug that presses on the pleasure side has the potential to be addictive”
“Patients with anxiety and insomnia who take benzodiazepines (Xanax and Klonopin) and other sedative-hypnotics daily for more than a month may experience worsened anxiety and insomnia.”
“Recent data show that even antidepressants, previously thought not to be “habit forming,” may lead to tolerance and dependence, and possibly even make depression worse over the long haul, a phenomenon called tardive dysphoria.”
“I’ve had many patients over the years who have told me that their psychiatric medications, while offering short-term relief from painful emotions, also limit their ability to experience the full range of emotions, especially powerful emotions like grief and awe.”
“In medicating ourselves to adapt to the world, what kind of world are we settling for? Under the guise of treating pain and mental illness, are we rendering large segments of the population biochemically indifferent to intolerable circumstance? Worse yet, have psychotropic medications become a means of social control, especially of the poor, unemployed, and disenfranchised?”
“Please don’t misunderstand me. These medications can be lifesaving tools and I’m grateful to have them in clinical practice. But there is a cost to medicating away every type of human suffering, and as we shall see, there is an alternative path that might work better: embracing pain.”

 

 

Financial Crisis 2008-2009

*”The Big Short” by Michael Lewis

*”Fault Lines” by Raghuram G. Rajan

“Crisis Economics” by Nouriel Roubini

*”This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” by Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff

“After the Music Stopped” by Alan Blinder —- currently I am reading this one

*”13 Bankers” by Simon Johnson and James Kwak

 

Investment 101, Personal Finance

    • *”The Motley Fool: You have More Than You Think: The Foolish Guide to Personal Finance” by David & Tom Gardner

 

Political Economics

    • “White House Burning” by Simon Johnson and James Kwak

 

Behavioral Finance

*”Predcitably Irrational” by Dan Ariely

*”Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

*”Irrational Exuberance” by Robert Shiller

*”What Investors Really Want” by Meir Statman

*”Investing and the Irrational Mind” by Robert Koppel

*”Nudge” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

*”Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman

 

Market Efficiency

    *”A Random Walk Down Wall Street” by Burton G. Malkiel

 

Value Investing

    • *”One Up On Wall Street” by Peter Lynch

*”Beating the Street” by Peter Lynch

*”The Warren Buffett Way” by Robert G. Hagstrom

 

Quants, Derivatives, Hedge Fund Managers

    • “The Quants” by Scott Patterson

“Diary of a Very Bad Year” by

*”Money Masters of Our Time” by John Train

 

Economists

    • “Lives of the Laureates: Eighteen Nobel Economists” by William Breit, Barry T. Hirsch

 

International Investing, International Economics, Foreign Currency

    • *”When Markets Collide” by Mohamed El-Erian

“Adventure Capitalist” by Jim Rogers

*”Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis” by James Rickards

 

Economics in general

    • *”Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics” by P.J. O’Rourke

 

Investments in general

    • “The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read” by Daniel R. Solin

*”Stocks for the Long Run” by Jeremy Siegel

 

Alternative Investing

    • *”Hot Commodities” by Jim Rogers

 

Do Yourself Investing or Passively-Managed Fund

    1. *”The Investment Answer: Learn to Manage Your Money & Protect Your Financial Future” by Daniel C. Goldie. Gorrdon S. Murray

*”Worry-Free Investing: A Safe Approach to Achieving Your Lifetime Financial Goals” by Zvi Bodie, Michael J. Clowes

*”Index Funds: The 12-Step Program for Active Investors” by Mark T Hebner

 

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