
Maybe we shouldn't shoot all the buffalo

If you're going to be a struggling writer, be one in Paris

Coke-fuelled parties in a Bolivian prison cell

History is written by the victors then dramatised by Shakespeare

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you entered?

Willpower is a finite resource, but it can be strengthened over time

Nothing happens – twice. A canvas onto which we project meaning

Rules-of-thumb to survive as an options dealer

Charming, rapidfire detective novel set on the railways of postwar Japan

If only it were as easy as "justified true belief"

Wildly creative hard-scifi with a focus on AI and space exploration

The absolute burden of absolute power

The problems women face are made, not born.

I read this out of respect for Hegel

Murakami at his finest: familiar themes revisited with graceful maturity

Always invite AI to the table

Winter, war, and beer

Should be titled "Great Art of the Western World"

Harry Potter if he were born a genius rationalist

History is a cycle of mimetic violence

Bad situations tend to be Nash Equilibria

One of the great minds of the 20th century, who tragically died aged 26

We are possibility incarnate

Decent intro to the major macro asset classes

Then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils

The facts do not speak for themselves

Deconstruction that eschews deconstructionism

You can't take it with you, old sport

Women desire sovereignty over men

Strange things happen when even light can't escape gravity

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain

A gedankenexperiment about an unidentified black cloud in space

A practical how-to guide that has been used in actual coups

Step-by-step guide to systematic futures trading

We are either secure, anxious, or avoidant

A schema for seducers

A troubled chess master's creeping descent into madness

Beautiful, surprising adaptation of a classic.

Satire on everlasting love, or a grim portrait of its reality?

Created, but did not perfect, the genre of dystopian fiction

The Geist has been driving us towards self-knowledge

Equilibrium thinking is unintuitive

Extraordinary talent born at the right time

CIA guide on knowing thyself

Find glitches in the markets

HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN

Essential trader lore

An astounding ability to bounce back from failure

A technical analysis trading journal

Memory is a fickle mistress

Global chip supply chains are mind-numbingly complex

Excellent introduction to rates markets

Definitive (excessively so) tome on the history of oil

Disturbing memoir of a downwards spiral

Antiquated study of momentum signals

Volatility, Fat Tails, and Tail Risk hedging

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Aspiration → Ambitions → Actions

Mindset, methodology, mathematics

Model-free options trading

14 years! 5127 prototypes!

Literally everyone is being exploited

Separate your beliefs and preferences

We must make a dent in 51 billion tonnes / year of CO2

Perfect book for a junior commodity trader

Mixture of literary commentary and discussion of historicity

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Compelling explorations of "toy" universes

Compelling explorations of "toy" universes

The beautifully dark macrohistory of the universe

Cosmic Sociology

Seek concurrent necessity: by the time xyz happens, what else must have happened?

Solid intro to mid-frequency quant

Just like those random Medium posts applying LSTMs to stock prices

Intuition-focused intro to derivatives

Semi-technical lecture series on the qualia of scientific research

Zoological travelogue with Adams’ biting wit

People care about relative risk, not absolute risk. The CAPM is wrong!

A photorealistic portrait of high finance from the front lines


What makes someone willing to play Russian Roulette for their country? The Right Stuff.

Constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences

An excellent opinionated guide on practical statistical modelling

An astounding fugue on self-reference and heterarchies

Each culture has its own approach to data

The chemical engineering that underlies pretty much everything we consume
Practical intro to vol surface models

These are the Laws of the Jungle. Everything else has been competed away.

Eventually persuaded that the title isn't an oxymoron

Distressed debt investing from a woman in a male-dominated industry

Too smart for their own good, with strange incentives from the capital markets

He would not be a wolf, but that the Romans are sheep

I believe in my own fallibility

Mythology is a mirror for society

Big tech is stealing our focus

Military incompetence is not driven by stupidity, but by child psychology

Good if you like integrals and will need to be calibrating vol models

HBS professor explores drivers of happiness. Invest in relationships!

With Black-Scholes as your hammer, everything looks like an option

Cheerfully challenge your philosophical idols with light taps of a hammer

The rest is just details

Perpetually amusing and delightfully clever.

Think big, solve problems for people, and build networks

The spice must flow

We are layers and layers of circuits

Habit-forming loop: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment

Advanced options book with a lot of secret sauce!

Cosy comfort

We believe what we want to be true

A portrait of a mind at home in the world, moving with agility and certainty, though not without doubt, not without regret

Mind viruses, Neurolinguistic hacking, and Sumerian mythology

Give devs problems, not solutions

Go-to introductory rec for time series methods

One of the best instalments in the series

Quite simply, one of the best sci-fi books of all time

Anything can be measured

Jack of all trades is oftentimes better than a master of one

Correlation is evidence of causation (T&Cs apply)

Deserves its reputation for being trashfic

The rare mathematical genius who is practical and worldly.

Great intro to hedge fund Long/Short investing

Capitalism requires competition, but tends to destroy competition

Don't pretend to be more (or less) than you are

Look at the world as stocks, flows, feedback loops, and hierarchies

Accessible overview of Porter's thinking

The Seven Ways that you can build competitive advantage

Central banks play a game of bluff with expectations

A manifesto for value investing

A dramatically overrated intro to financial ML

Grit is important. You probably need it to get through the book.

Classic hedge fund canon

Don Draper if he were a nerd

Good birds-eye picture of ML

Reflections on a lifetime's study of history


Vonnegut's best novel

Red China, ideology, and aliens

Not as bad as it sounds

A disturbing, hallucinogenic PKD classic

Introductory text for wannabe rationalists.




Vague, philosophical, but contains important lessons about the philosophy of models

Memory palaces are effective

The economics of the South American drug trade


Skip this book and learn about Taylor expansions

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time

Vonnegut's most Vonnegut novel




Deeply considered schema of sin, though often allegorical for petty political feuds

Magical realist exploration of fate – the iconic Murakami novel

The struggle of the "thinking and feeling heart" in dealing with societal sea changes



None

A scientific, but not overly scientific, analysis of some stylised facts about financial markets

Can humans overcome their need for vengeance to give a fair trial to the defeated enemies?

A quest for individualism in the Jazz Age

Life is a rage against the second law of thermodynamics

You can overintellectualize these Greek letters. One Greek word that ought to be in there is hubris.

With an antifragile hammer, everything looks like a fragile nail

Horrific expose into America's domestic sex industry

Trippy, fast-paced, genre-defining cyberpunk with a prescient vision of AI

The precursors to Lovecraft's cosmic horror

Startups are HARD, and being a startup CEO kinda sucks


Scifi that requires a PhD in physics

The world is bad, and getting better.

Consciousness, computation, being.

Mediocre telling of the Theranos debacle

Why do some people not learn from mistakes?

Harrowing look at the criminal justice system in America

Self-regulation is hard when incentive drives behaviour

We are playing Russian roulette with our existence

The Golden Age of LBOs: 'A few million dollars are always lost in the sands of time'

Sometimes you do just have to lock in

Boesky and Milken's dramatic rise and fall in this classic insider trading drama

Mind-blowing scifi that is easeiest to appreciate with a PhD

We should apply rationality to charitable giving

Work may not set you free, but...

Note-taking that emphasises connections

Benjamin Franklin: those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither

Somebody may beat me, but by God they're going to have to bleed to do it

What does the Fox say? P(A|B) = …

History is shaped by fat tails

Mediocre biography on a not-so-mediocre man

Trump's 2016 win was a surprise for him, and he was woefully unprepared

Postrational reflections on personal finance

Would you rather be lucky or skilled?

Complexity science is a pre-emergent complex system

Clever, soulful, hard sci-fi

Our minds are nested hierarchies of pattern-recognition circuits

Ants are amazing

Applied decision-making, viewed through the lens of poker

Dry survey on realised vol

Optimise without an optimiser

Convertible bond arb, pre Black-Scholes

Religion and politics have always been inseparable

Classic space opera in an analogue world, studying the true nature of power

Harrowing reminder of the immense responsibility of a parent

Markets are inefficient enough to justify efficiency-seeking behaviour

Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him

Classic set of interviews with global macro traders

The market oscillates between greed and fear

Harrowing memoir of the holocaust

Master manipulator, or victim of a witch hunt?

A funny and informative investing classic

A philosophical take on the persecution of Christians in Japan

Read this as an applied history course rather than a Machiavellian playbook

Think second-order, understand value relative to price, and know where you are in the cycle

Maximise the data:ink ratio

Successful retail trading is not impossible

The easiest vol textbook to recommend

Quirky magical realism morphing into a benign thriller

Successful traders have the same underlying mental model

Economists have physics envy; they should instead turn to ecology

Remains of the Day… with robots

Dated, may not even be replicable, but still a behavioural econ classic

There is beauty in banality

Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.

Life is quite absurd, and death's the final word

Murakami's life as an author, through the lens of running