TL;DR: The Best Finance Books in One Sentence

I enjoy reading finance books but most people do not.

So to make your life easier, I’ve gone through all the classic finance books and distilled the message into a single sentence or phrase.

I would still recommend reading many of these books if you haven’t, but let’s be realistic, that’s probably not going to happen for all but the biggest finance geeks on the planet (again, that’s me).

Here’s what I came up with:

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The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Give yourself a margin of safety because Mr. Market can be insane.

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One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

Buy what you know.

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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin LeFevre

The trend is your friend.

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Where Are the Customers Yachts? by Fred Schwed

Wall Street can be an unforgiving place.

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Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Philip A. Fisher

Buy high-quality stocks and never sell.

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The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

Shit happens.

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The Money Game by Adam Smith

The stocks don’t know you own them.

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A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

Don’t try to beat the market.

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The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

Markets are one giant feedback loop.

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Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

Greed is good…for Wall Street.

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Stocks For the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel

Buy and hold.

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The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle

Costs matter.

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When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein

Temperament is more important than IQ.

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Against The Gods by Peter Bernstein

Risk is in the eye of the beholder.

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Winning the Loser’s Game by Charles Ellis

You win at the game of investing by avoiding mistakes.

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Your Money & Your Brain by Jason Zweig

We’re not hardwired to be successful investors.

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Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth by Nick Murray

The triumph of stocks.

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The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley

Live below your means.

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Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger

Read and learn widely.

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I would never put my own work among this list of classics but if I had to sum up my books in one phrase it would be this:

KISS (keep it simple, stupid)

Further reading:
9 Underrated Investing Books

This post originally ran on August 9, 2019.

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