Professional Investing

A must-listen biography from the author of the best-selling Warren Buffett Speaks.

Trading is a chaotic, complex, and loosely-structured game played by the smartest minds and most expensive computers in the world. It is the ultimate puzzle. Few can trade at an elite level for an extended period. The game is constantly changing and the rules, mechanics, and probabilities are difficult to observe and forever in flux. Just when you think you’ve got a plan: BAM.

While most currency trading and foreign exchange books focus on international finance theory or simplistic chart-based strategies, The Art of Currency Trading is a comprehensive guide that will teach you how to profitably trade currencies in the real world. Author Brent Donnelly has been a successful interbank FX trader for more than 20 years and in this book, he shares the specific strategies and tactics he has used to profit in the forex marketplace. The book helps investors understand and master foreign exchange trading in order to achieve sustainable long-term financial success.

The Pro-Retail Trader is a guide to help retail traders trade like professionals, from someone who has actually done it. Steve Ruffley has spent 25 years trading the markets. He trained as a professional and he is now a pro-retail trader. He has achieved wins such as $10,000 in two minutes, $77,000 in two hours, and $90,000 in one day. These are professional trader results, but Steve trades his own account from home, using a retail broker.

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. Growing up in the 1980’s Turney Duff was your average kid from Kennebunk, Maine, eager to expand his horizons. After trying – and failing – to land a job as a journalist, he secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that exists in the trading pits.

What happens when a young Wall Street investment banker spends a small fortune to have lunch with Warren Buffett? He becomes a real value investor. In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward. Spier reveals his transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe, driven by greed, to a sophisticated investor who enjoys success without selling his soul to the highest bidder.

John Paulson, a softly spoken hedge-fund manager who still took the bus to work, seemed unlikely to stake his career on one big gamble. But he did - and The Greatest Trade Ever is the story of how he realised that the sub-prime housing bubble was going to burst, making $15 billion for his fund and more than $4 billion for himself in a single year. It's a tale of folly and wizardry, individual brilliance versus institutional stupidity.

Edwin Lefevre was a stockbroker and an independent investor, as well as a novelist and writer of short stories. This lightly fictionalized account of the career of stock speculator Jesse Livermore was first published in 1923. Now, nearly 100 years later, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator remains highly recommended for an understanding of investment. Lefevre’s trading advice and analyses of market price movements are as relevant today as in 1923.

First published in 1923, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is the fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of the greatest speculators who ever lived. Now, almost 90 years later, it remains the most widely read, highly recommended investment book ever written. Generations of investors have found that it has more to teach them about themselves and other investors than years of experience in the market. They have also discovered that its trading advice and keen analyses of market price movements rings true.

During Wall Street's last big bull market, there were brokers in $3,000 suits, billion-dollar IPO's, and 30-year-olds making $100,000 a month. And then there was Louis Pasciuto, who came from Staten Island at the age of 19 and discovered one indelible truth about himself: He was born to steal. This is the astounding, true story of the rise and fall of this fast-talking, street-smart wiseguy, as well as the insidious ways the Mob infiltrates, then controls, Wall Street.

First published in 1994, The Warren Buffet Way gave investors their first in-depth look at the innovative investment and business strategies behind this living legend's spectacular success. Tracing Warren Buffett's career from the beginning, Hagstrom revealed to listeners exactly how, starting with an initial investment of only $100, Buffett built a business empire worth $19.4 billion.

In The Rule, legendary trader and hedge fund pioneer Larry Hite recounts his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn as a dyslexic, partially blind kid who was anything but a model student - and how he went on to found and run Mint Investment Management Company, one of the most profitable and largest quantitative hedge funds in the world.

The early years of venture capital were a far cry from today’s very public dealings. Alan Patricof, one of the pioneers of the venture arena, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the past 50 years of the industry. From buying stock in Apple when its market valuation was only $60 million to founding New York Magazine to investing in AOL, Audible, and more recently, Axios, his discerning approach to finding companies is almost peerless.

Wouldn't life be better if you were free of the daily grind - the conventional job and boss - and instead, succeeded or failed purely on the merits of your own investment choices? Free Capital is a window into this world. Based on a series of interviews, it outlines the investing strategies, wisdom, and lifestyles of 12 highly successful private investors. Each of them has accumulated £1 million or more - in most cases, considerably more - mainly from stock market investment.

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’s mind, giving listeners a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us - how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of his mentor’s betrayal and of his brother’s death from of AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything takes the listener behind the scenes of these firms: their famous billionaire founders, the overlapping stories of their creation and evolution, and the outsized ambitions that led a group of clever bankers from small shops operating in a corner of Wall Street into powerhouse titans of capital. This is the story of the money and the men who handle it.

In this formative period, from 1941-78, Buffett developed and honed the investment philosophy that would lead him to become so successful as his career progressed. But it was not all plain sailing - Buffett made mistakes along the way - and Arnold shows how Buffett learned through success and failure how to select companies worth backing. Arnold also includes insightful "learning points" at the end of each chapter, which reveal how investors can learn from the craft of Warren Buffett to improve their own investing.

Investing can be a roller-coaster of highs and lows, and the investors detailed here reveal just how low it can go; stories from Warren Buffet, Bill Ackman, Chris Sacca, Jack Bogle, Mark Twain, John Maynard Keynes, and many more illustrate the simple but overlooked concept that investing is really hard, whether you're managing a few thousand dollars or a few billion. Failures and losses are part of the game. Much more than just anecdotal diversion, these stories set the basis for the book's critical focus: learning from mistakes.

Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the listener the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more 20-hour workday and another lap dance away. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity - and, ultimately, this book.

When we left Buffett at the end of volume two, he had reached a fortune of one billion dollars. In this enthralling next installment, we follow Buffett's investment deals over the decade from 1989 to 1998, as Berkshire shares jumped 14-fold from $4,700 to $68,000 and its market cap grew from five billion to one hundred billion. Buffett was as driven as ever to seek out great companies at good prices. By studying the decision-making that went into his investment deals, and the successful and unsuccessful outcomes, we can learn from Buffett and become better investors ourselves.