Reading list
Classic books about money and markets
Most modern money books are about you: your budget, your habits, your index fund. The old ones are about crowds, which is more useful, because the crowd is who you are trading against. Tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble, bank runs and the panics of 1907 are all here, told by people who watched them.
14 books, all free to read
This is not investment advice, and nothing here is new. That is rather the point: the same mistakes, two centuries apart.
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1. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefèvre
A barely disguised life of the trader Jesse Livermore, and the book traders still recommend first. Every lesson is learned by losing.
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2. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
Tulips, the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi scheme. Mackay on how whole countries go mad together. Read the money chapters first.
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3. Lombard Street
by Walter Bagehot
How the London money market worked, and why a central bank must lend freely in a panic. Still quoted at every crisis.
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4. The Way to Wealth
by Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard's sayings gathered into one speech about thrift and work. Ten minutes long.
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5. The Psychology of the Stock Market
by G. C. Selden
A short 1912 book on why the crowd buys high and sells low. Behavioural finance before the name.
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6. The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
Where economics starts: the pin factory, the invisible hand and the division of labour. Read Book One and skim the rest.
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7. The Art of Money Getting
by P. T. Barnum
The showman's twenty rules for making money, in a short lecture. Funny, and mostly right.
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8. Fifty Years in Wall Street
by Henry Clews
Fifty years of Wall Street panics and corners from a banker who was there. Long, so dip into the crises.
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9. The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Veblen coins conspicuous consumption: why the rich spend to be seen spending. Dry, and devastating.
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10. The Economic Consequences of the Peace
by John Maynard Keynes
Keynes walks out of the Versailles conference and predicts the ruin its reparations will cause. He was right.
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11. The Gospel of Wealth
by Andrew Carnegie
What a fortune is for, according to the man who had the biggest one. Short and still provocative.
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12. Thrift
by Samuel Smiles
Samuel Smiles on saving, debt and living within your means. Earnest, and quietly sensible.
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13. The Science of Getting Rich
by Wallace D. Wattles
The 1910 mindset book that inspired The Secret. Read it to see where a whole genre came from.
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14. A Tract on Monetary Reform
by John Maynard Keynes
Keynes on inflation and the value of money after the First World War. Short and surprisingly clear.
Read it as a path: Money and markets
Two centuries of booms, busts and the people who traded through them.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.