A Random Walk Down Wall Street

A good read for anyone wanting to understand more about the history of the markets. The tl;dr is “buy and hold index funds”. As a young, relatively conservative investor I tend to agree. I liked the latter part of the book which got more into technical subjects and dissected things like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Modern Portfolio Theory. The author clearly supports an index approach and works for Wealthfront so his conclusion is foregone before the book even starts, but he does have a lot of data to support his position. I appreciated his clear writing style and judicious use of graphs. I felt that some of his “jokes” were kind of off-color, however, as most of them had to do with sex or sexism. They were out of place and unnecessary in a book on finances and off-putting.

The first 1/4 of the book is a world class rant. The remaining 3/4 is a really good introduction to sane investment strategy, with some good tips on how to play in the stock market in the closing material.