The Shelf
Books, ideas, and the thinkers who built the frameworks everyone else borrows.
What game does this idea reveal?
The Teardowns
BookHow BlackRock turned stewardship into a decision machine
The Sentence Wasn’t the System
BlackRock’s 2012 engagement language gave its existing size a public rationale, and over the next decade that model showed up in engagement, voting, disclosure requests, and…
TeardownOn The Man Who Solved the Market — Gregory Zuckerman
The Human Was the Bug
Jim Simons did not build a better trader. He removed the trader entirely — because the most predictable, exploitable pattern in any market is the person on the other side of it.
TeardownOn Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke
You Won. You Were Also Wrong.
A good decision and a good outcome are not the same thing. Confusing them — “resulting” — is the most expensive mistake in finance, and the hardest to see because it feels like…
TeardownOn Liar’s Poker — Michael Lewis
The Floor Rewards the Liar
Markets do not reward the person who is right. They reward the person who is believed. Lewis wrote a warning and Wall Street read it as a recruitment brochure.
The Canon
Not new releases. Not recommendations. A permanent shelf of the books that explain how money, power and risk actually move — chosen by people who play the game, not people who report on it.
Markets
Against the Gods
1996Peter L. Bernstein
The history of risk, told as the story of who got paid for bearing it.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes
1978Charles P. Kindleberger
Every bubble is the same bubble. This is the field guide to spotting it early.
The Man Who Solved the Market
2019Gregory Zuckerman
Simons removed the human from the trade because the human was the bug.
Power
Barbarians at the Gate
1989Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
How a company gets eaten — with the manners left in and the mercy taken out.
The Prize
1991Daniel Yergin
Oil is not a commodity. It is the map of the last hundred years of power.
Decisions
Thinking, Fast and Slow
2011Daniel Kahneman
The instruction manual for the machine that makes your worst calls.
Thinking in Bets
2018Annie Duke
A good decision and a good outcome are not the same thing. Learn the difference or pay for it.
Fooled by Randomness
2001Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most of what looks like skill is luck wearing a good suit.
The Game
Liar’s Poker
1989Michael Lewis
The floor rewards the confident liar over the correct analyst. Nothing has changed.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
1923Edwin Lefèvre
A century old, still the most honest book ever written about wanting to win.