For Your Consideration

On this page you’ll find books that are excellent foundational guides for the principles of personal investment. Sorry there are no “get rich quick” books to be found here, as there are none of note. It takes time, a little bit of money and commitment to learn. I promise you that time spent reading any one of the following books will be time well spent. The links provided are informational use only and no compensation is paid to me through any affiliate program.

While the books can be read in any order, I would encourage you to read The Coffeehouse Investor by Bill Schultheis first. It’s the only investment book I’ve asked my wife to read should I predecease her. If marijuana is a “gateway” drug to drugs like heroin, then think of this book as the “gateway drug” to more continued personal investment study.

I am greatly indebted to each of these authors for illuminating the way.

Selected Works:

by John C. Bogle:

• Common Sense on Mutual Funds : New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor
• Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

by Larry E. Swedroe:

• What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know : How You Can Build Real Wealth Investing in Index Funds
• The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You’ll Ever Need : Index Mutual Funds and Beyond
• Rational Investing in Irrational Times
• The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You’ll Ever Need: The Way Smart Money Preserves Wealth Today
• The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You’ll Ever Need: The Way Smart Money Invests Today

by William Bernstein:

• The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
• The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk

And:

• Winning the Loser’s Game by Charles Ellis
• A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
• The Informed Investor : A Hype-Free Guide to Constructing a Sound Financial Portfolio by Frank Armstrong
• Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter Bernstein

The Nerd-gasm Section

For those who’ve read the selections above and have a taste for more challenging math. It is Harry Markowitz’s original ideas in the 1950’s that gave the world the underpinnings of Modern Portfolio Theory and led to his sharing the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics with Dr. William Sharpe, whose work on the Capital Asset Pricing Model, laid further groundwork for equity index funds and explained systemic and unsystemic risks. It is fair to say that without the work outlined below, the books above this section would not exist. Investors everywhere are (whether they know it or not) are indebted for these financial works.

• Portfolio Theory and Capital Markets by William F. Sharpe
• Portfolio Selection : Efficient Diversification of Investments by Harry Markowitz