Reddit mentions of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto)

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Security Analysis - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• The Interpretation of Financial Statements - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports - Howard Schilit
  
  
• Applied Value Investing - Joseph Calandro
  
  
• Analysis for Financial Management - Robert Higgins
  
  
• Margin of Safety - Seth Klarman
  
  
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings - Philip Fisher
  
  
• One Up On Wall Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• Beating The Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• The Essays of Warren Buffett - Warren Buffett
  
  
• Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
  
  
• Buffett Beyond Value - Prem Jain
  
  
• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• You Can Be A Stock Market Genius - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Little Book That Beats The Market - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Big Secret for the Small Investor: A New Route to Long-Term Investment Success - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Leferve
  
  
• Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger
  
  
• Rediscovered Benjamin Graham - Janet Lowe
  
  
• The Theory of Investment Value - John Burr Williams
  
  
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger - Peter Bevelin
  
  
• Security Analysis and Business Valuation on Wall Street - Jeffrey Hooke
  
  
• Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment - James Montier
  
  
• Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• The Dark Side of Valuation - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports - Thomas Ittelson
  
  
• Buyout - Rick Rickertsen
  
  
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini
  
  
• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics - Gary Belsky
  
  
• The Warren Buffett Way - Robert Hagstrom
  
  
• The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks
  
  
• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• Accounting For Value - Stephen Penman
  
  
• Distressed Debt Analysis - Stephen Moyer
  
  
• Bankruptcy Investing - Ben Branch
  
  
• The Vulture Investors - Hilary Rosenberg
  
  
• Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring - Stuart Gilson
  
  
• Distress Investing - Martin J Whitman
  
  
• The Aggressive Conservative Investor - Martin J Whitman

Have you read Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan or his Fooled by Randomness?
If not, go and order a copy of both now.

Agreed - A Random Walk Down Wall Street is the best book out there.

Also, see The Automatic Millionaire. This is a convincing book as to why you need to start saving for retirement at a young age, and how every year you wait to start saving can result in tens of thousands lost at retirement. (Essentially - compound interest starts compounding hugely after 25 years).

Also, Fooled by Randomness is a classic as well about having a sophisticated approach to investing - e.g. how randomness fools individuals into thinking that they're actually controlling the market in investing...

Fooled by Randomness

The Black Swan

Predictably Irrational

Lots of great recommendations in this thread; I've added a few to my reading list. Here are my suggestions (copied from a previous thread):

• How to Win Friends and Influence People - Everyone with a mother should practice this.
  
• Tao Te Ching (S. Mitchell translation)
  
• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy - I never cared about economics until after I was done with school, and didn't remember anything from university class. This helped explain a lot of common fallacies many people make.
  
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets - As Taleb says in the beginning of the book, anyone from any profession could have written this book, but a financial background makes this much more interesting. Anyone interested in science and what we can learn from the world of past experience should read this. This led to the next book:
  
• How to Live: A Life of Montaigne - A biography of Montaigne, a great skeptic, always curious, interested in what it means to be human. I found I could relate a great deal with the man, as many others have in different ways. The dust-jacket description made it sound like a boring historical overview, but I think the book flowed pretty well and was always interesting.
  
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Anyone that ever creates a slideshow, or attempts to represent data visually should read this book. More than once. I'd say it changed my life.
  
  And, the following two are a look into the lives of two great men that lived in the 20th century; both offer many points worth emulating.
  
  
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
  
• The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer (once available in full on PBS website, seems not to be the case now ...)

• Read The Money Game, by Adam Smith. At least read the first sentence, and internalize it.
  
  
• Read Where Are All The Customers Yachts?, by Fred Schweb
  
  
• Read Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis
  
  
• Read When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein
  
  
• Read Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  
  Then:
  
  
• Continually educate/train yourself to acquire/maintain the skills and knowledge necessary to survive and thrive in the 21st century economy.
  
  
• Buy a house you can life in the rest of your life if you have to. And in general, never buy a house as an investment; always buy it with the thought that you might end up living there for much, much longer than planned.
  
  
• Insure yourself against disaster. Among other things, this means various types of insurance and readily accessible cash. People have mentioned 3 - 6 months. That's a good start. I have three years worth of staggered CDs, and I feel pretty comfortable. Consider that a target worth aiming for.
  
  
• Find a really, really good, stand-up person to marry. If you make the right choice he/she will be invaluable in hard times; if you make the wrong choice, he/she will be the hard times.
  
  
• If you plan on having kids, remember this: there will always be ways to get them through college without gutting your nest egg. Don't put them through college at the expense of risking having them need to take care of you in old age.
  
  
• Stay healthy. Exercise. Eat good foods. Get regular check ups.
  
  
• Be thrifty. Study thrift. Make it a game (although don't be a bore about it). Learning to be a good cook, for instance, is a great investment in more than one way.
  
  Finally, always remember the first line in The Money Game.
  
  Good luck!

This is a subject close to my heart... One can do such wonderful things with language, it's a waste to limit oneself to only a small subset of the words available. There are ways to speak and write interestingly without sounding like a pretentious ponce.

To echo some of the other advice here, READ - but pick something challenging that interests you, and read with a dictionary by your side. (You could write down the new words as you learn them, if you want to go all-out nerd...) Also, keep your dictionary near to where you usually read - if it's in bed, make sure you can reach it without much effort. Force yourself to look up words that you're not sure of instead of glossing over them.

I'm trying to think of examples that you could try for some vocabulary gymnastics: Nassim Taleb likes to show off his erudition, so I always learn something new from him. Fooled by Randomness is of fairly general interest.

I also sat with a dictionary when I read Civilizations and Millennium by Felipe Fernandez Armesto. Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama was also a challenging read.

I guess I'm hoping for something that will help me see the world in a different light.

Read a couple really good books like this, both fiction and non-fiction, and you can really add some depth to your thoughts.

I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance right now, and loving it, but something like The Elegant Universe or Fooled by Randomness can have the same effect.

Alternatively, a hilarious book would also be great. Haven't read a good book that make me literally LOL in a long while (I am America and So Can You was probably the last one), so if you think you've got one, I'd love to see it. =D

If you read this, I highly recommend following it up with Fooled by Randomness. Part of the book debunks "The Millionaire Next Door" because the author of "Next Door" fails to take into account selection bias. He only interviews people who already succeeded and leaves out all the thousands/millions of people that did the same things, but failed.

It's not to say that "Millionaire Next Door" isn't a good read and doesn't have interesting advice. It's just that it's misleading as to your chances of actual success.

blink is awesome if you want a popular book by Malcolm Gladwell.

If you want a more obscure and more technical book, buy Fooled by Randomness. The same author also wrote Black Swan but Fooled by Randomness is more technical and perhaps would be more to his liking.

Try this, a book that takes an empirical look at our system, who's rich, and why, rather than anecdotes on individual people. Your sample size is disappointing, Taleb's is enlightening.

The fact that saving money and living frugally is necessary for becoming rich (it isn't, by the way, getting a nice fat government subsidy is by far the most profitable venture but it requires you to have money in the first place I guess) does not imply that it's sufficient and the cases where it hasn't been sufficient are too numerous to count.

oh and, then in case they don't feel silly enough already...

Edit: They're books that disprove free-will, one in general the other in the market... meaning... there is no such thing as choice and so no such thing as fault... and if you still don't get it, that means a valid argument or stance on the kid morally is actually impossible... since he couldn't have done anything otherwise... lol