Arbitrage Andy - The Ultimate Wall Street Book List
Arbitrage Andy - The Ultimate Wall Street Book List
A comprehensive book list of the best Wall Street/Finance books in existence. Perfect for the avid fanboy or the analyst preparing for his first full time stint on the street or within financial services. Move Size.
*Please note this review contains affiliate links
FLASH - BOYS
#1 New York Times Bestseller ― With a new Afterword
Flash Boy's details the conception of IEX or The Investor's Exchange. Delving into latency arbitrage, high frequency trading, and the world of front running orders, Flash Boy's is a great glimpse into how technology has impacted Wall Street forever. Definite read for aspiring traders or quantitatives.
"Guaranteed to make blood boil." ―Janet Maslin, New York Times
In Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together―some of them
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LIAR'S POKER
Aside from Barbarians at the Gate, this is one of the must reads for any aspiring financier. Also helps that the book is an absolute savage depiction of capitalism, politics, money, and power. Wall Street will likely never have the same swagger or debauchery described in this book. Highly recommended for people trying to get into investment banking, trading, or sales.
The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush.
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BILLION DOLLAR WHALE
Excellent read and example of how modern Wall Street intertwines with the world, particularly Hollywood and other entertainment elite. Classic case of whomst MD when you find out Jho Low is just another Size Lord on his way to extreme wealth.
Malaysian businessman Jho Low is considered the mastermind of a multi-billion dollar financial scandal that involves a complex web of offshore shell companies, A-list celebrities, the Middle East and Wall Street.
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Den of Thieves recounts the insider trading scandals involving Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and other Wall Street financiers in the United States during the 1980s, such as Robert Freeman, Dennis Levine, Lowell Milken, John A. Mulheren, Martin Siegel, Timothy Tabor, Richard Wigton, Robert Wilkis, and others.
GET IT HERE
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
Barbarians at the gate details the immense corporate greed america saw during the 1980's by focusing on the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. If you are looking for a career in private equity and someone you are networking with finds out you have not read this book, you are going to be looked down upon. Classic movie as well.
The Chicago Tribune raves, “It’s hard to imagine a better story...and it’s hard to imagine a better account.” And in an era of spectacular business crashes and federal bailouts, it still stands as a valuable cautionary tale that must be heeded.
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THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR
Benjamin Graham provides a comprehensive although sometimes dated structure of investment principles in his popular book The Intelligent Investor. A must read for all hardos attempting to break into investment management or the world of hedge funds.
In fact, when he was writing in 1949, Graham was looking back over the previous 49 years of stock market history and concluded that sound investment principles produce generally sound results. He goes on to propose that “we must act on the assumption that they will continue to do so.” - Investor Junkie
GET IT HERE
A RANDOM WALK DOWN WALL STREET
Many investors over the years have claimed to have the best approach to dealing with stock markets. Malkiel argues that there is a high degree of randomness, emotion, and chance when dealing with markets in the US. Consistently outperforming markets is certainly much harder than it would appear.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, written by Burton Gordon Malkiel, a Princeton economist, is a book on the subject of stock markets which popularized the random walk hypothesis. Malkiel argues that asset prices typically exhibit signs of a random walk and that one cannot consistently outperform market averages - Wikipedia
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A great read that takes a closer look at the negative by product of concentrated confidence and bubble like arrogance on Wall Street. Detailing the formation of Long Term Capital Management and the associated stories.
In this business classic—now with a new Afterword in which the author draws parallels to the recent financial crisis—Roger Lowenstein captures the gripping roller-coaster ride of Long-Term Capital Management. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein explains not just how the fund made and lost its money but also how the personalities of Long-Term’s partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the culture of Wall Street itself contributed to both their rise and their fall. - Good Read
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THE BUY SIDE
The Buy Side is one of my favorite finance books because it gets into the raw goings on of the once great hedge fund Galleon Group. Many younger aspiring Wall Street savages forget that oftentimes the price you may have to pay will take a significant toll on your physical and mental health.
The Buy Side, by former Galleon Group trader Turney Duff, portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex are rampant and billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the most enticements. A remarkable writing debut, filled with indelible moments, The Buy Side shows as no book ever has the rewards – and dizzying temptations – of making a living on the Street. - Good Read
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BLACK EDGE
One of my favorite books revolving around the hedge fund world, Black Edge dives head first into the once great SAC Capital's grip on wall street and how they received valuable information curiously fast on nearly every stocks movement for a long time. The culture of SAC is also examined, where if you didn't know, it is rumored the finance vest trend emerged because Steve Cohen kept the trading floor frigid to keep traders sharp. Hot future fashion trends aside, there is a fair share of toxicity and of course a nice prison sentence for Matthew Martoma. Great read, but still pissed I never got my final round interview at Point 72! That Harvard cuck beat me out.
SAC Capital was once one of the most powerful hedge funds on Wall Street. Cohen, its fabled steward, was different from the other colossi of the industry (George Soros, Paul Tudor Jones) in that he never seemed to have a grand unified field theory of investing. Rather, he had a talent for reading the market’s movements and a freakishly high threshold for tolerating risk. - NY TIMES
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Andrew Ross Sorkintake us behind-the-scenes, for a moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global shit show of cluster fucked-ness. Good read to understand the context of other great books like The Big Short.
“We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience. - Good Read
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Mallaby dives into the world of extreme wealth and hedge funds in this excellent quick read drawing on a multitude of interesting sources.
Drawing on unprecedented access to the industry, including three hundred hours of interviews and binders of internal documents, Mallaby charts the history of hedge funds, telling the stories of the industry's pioneers, from the undercover anti-Nazi activist A.W. Jones, to the philosopher-financier George Soros, to the cryptographer and mathematician James Simons. He concludes that to a surprising and unrecognized degree, "the future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds." - CFR
Let me be blunt: Currently, many of my loved ones are out of work -- and like the majority of Americans, I can never afford a hedge fund and I didn't make money off the credit crisis. Perhaps you'll forgive me, then, for not warming to a terrific book about the moguls who did (SOFT!) . - NPR
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A fabulous book about the rise of quantitative strategy on Wall Street. With cameos from AQR, Citadel, and others, this is a quick and enjoyable read that details s monumental shift from the classic 1980's Wall Street allure.
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team. - Good Read
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
--Warren Buffett