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
Mixture of literary commentary and discussion of historicity
Perfect book for a junior commodity trader
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely
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?
Just like those random Medium posts applying LSTMs to stock prices
Solid intro to mid-frequency quant
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
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
HBS professor explores drivers of happiness. Invest in relationships!
Good if you like integrals and will need to be calibrating vol models
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, Neurolingusitc 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
Correlation is evidence of causation (T&Cs apply)
The rare mathematical genius who is practical and worldly.
Anything can be measured
Jack of all trades is oftentimes better than a master of one
Deserves its reputation for being trashfic
Capitalism requires competition, but tends to destroy competition
Look at the world as stocks, flows, feedback loops, and hierarchies
The Seven Ways that you can build competitive advantage
Vonnegut’s best novel
Red China, ideology, and aliens
A disturbing, hallucinogenic PKD classic
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
Memory palaces are effective
The economics of the South American drug trade
Skip this book and learn about Taylor expansions
A scientific, but not overly scientific, analysis of some stylised facts about financial markets
“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time”
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
Trippy, fast-paced, genre-defining cyberpunk with a prescient vision of AI
The precursors to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror
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
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 Milen’s dramatic rise and fall in this classic insider trading drama
We should apply rationality to charitable giving
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
Postrational reflections on personal finance
Trump’s 2016 win was a surprise for him, and he was woefully unprepared
We are playing Russian roulette with our existence
Complexity science is a pre-emergent complex system
Our minds are nested hierarchies of pattern-recognition circuits
Ants are
Applied decision-making, viewed through the lens of poker
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
The market oscillates between greed and fear
Master manipulator, or victim of a witch hunt?
A funny and informative investing classic
Philosophical reading about the persecution of Christians in Japan
Ostensible Machiavellian playbook, but better seen as an applied history course.
Think second-order, understand value relative to price, and know where you are in the cycle
Maximise the data:ink ratio
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 is quite absurd, and death’s the final word
Murakami’s life as an author, through the lens of running