Suggested Readings

Books and Readings You May Enjoy

Our List of Further Readings

If you enjoyed In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio and are interested in reading more about some of the topics in that book, you may also enjoy some of the following books and articles. They are listed in chronological order of their first edition.

• Burton Malkiel, (first published in 1973) 2019, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Revised and updated edition, WW Norton, New York, NY.
  Malkiel was an early advocate for index fund investing versus active security selection. The book describes fundamental concepts underlying stock valuation, introduces the concepts of Modern Portfolio Theory, and presents practical investment advice related to a life-cycle approach to investing.

• Charles Ellis, (first published in 1985) 2021, Winning the Loser’s Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing, 8th Edition, McGraw Hill Education, New York, NY.
  Ellis was one of the first practitioners to advocate for passive index investing. His book presents simple but important investment messages predicated on a tennis analogy: amateur players should concentrate their game on not losing, or not committing unforced errors, just as non-professional investors shouldn’t try to beat the market.

• Peter Bernstein, 1992, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street, The Free Press, New York, NY.
  The book examines the evolution of Wall Street from the development of theories to the implementation of investment practices, featuring Louis Bachelier, Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, Franco Modigliani, and Merton Miller.

• Jeremy Siegel, (first published in 1994) 2014, Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies, 5th Edition, McGraw Hill Education, New York, NY.
  The book makes a compelling evidence-based case for the importance of including stocks in one’s portfolio. Siegel presents a lot of analysis based on over a century of historical stock market data. He also takes a broader perspective of the economic impact on stocks, and examines not only stock returns but stock return fluctuations as well.

• Peter Bernstein, 2009, Capital Ideas Evolving, Wiley, New York, NY.
  Since the writing of Capital Ideas in 1992, some critics argued that the academics used too many simplifying assumptions. A school of thought, known as behavioural finance, proposed that investors are not as rational as the models assume and are subject to psychological biases. Bernstein’s new volume is in defence of his academic heroes. Although he accepts some of the theories’ limitations, he argues that the professors built the structure for today’s capital markets.

• Justin Fox, 2009, The Myth of the Rational Market: A history of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, Harper Business, New York, NY.
  The book juxtaposes the contributions of the rational school of thought luminaries such as Harry Markowitz, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Merton Miller, Eugene Fama, John Bogle, Fischer Black, and Michael Jensen, with the behaviorist school of thought luminaries such as Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller—what was right with the rationalist theories and what went wrong.

• John Bogle, 2015, John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
  The book is a compilation of speeches made by the Vanguard founder over a 50-year span in his illustrious career. His key message is related to the importance of low-cost index investing.

• Andrew Lo, 2017, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
  The award-winning book draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, to create a new theoretical model, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, that shows that the theory of market efficiency isn’t wrong but merely incomplete.