Most wealth creation books are fluff. I wonder of there are any good books out there that have directly contributed to your wealth building endeavors. Which books have helped you make more money.
But "Investing for Dummies" teached me many valuable lessons. I read it when I was ~15 so it was my first insight into economics, business, and investing. It's well written and digestable.
Holy crap I have that book. Can you elaborate more? I’m learning C right now for a variety of reasons but I didn’t think learning posix c would bump my value as a web dev.
One example was being able to write native gems so that I integrate ruby directly with other C based services.
Writing ruby code that directly interacts with mail servers, databases in a thread safe manor was quite useful.
Like learning assembly, sometimes it’s not directly useful, but it does make you write better code; since you understand more of what’s under the hood.
For profit at the poker table...I crushed the live club tourneys, my favorite series was Harrington on Hold'em series. I do have Kill Everyone, but forgot it (I remember it had ICM and push-shove tables?)
I think that could be a problem if they are playing games using tactics from other books.
I think I remember this book as basing your negotiation off of what both sides value. This should lead to near-fair value for both sides. Of course that's not going to happen often (if ever) in the real world. I think the book even mentioned that its strategy is still valid even if the other side has read it.
I don’t think that’s a problem. The tactics aren’t all zero sum. For example just talking to the other party to find out what they want other than the main thing they’re asking for.
The first time I used it I lost out on a dream house I wanted to buy. I’m pretty sure I cut the asking price by about 50k with my low initial offer. But I was so over confident that the seller wanted to sell to me over the others that I didn’t take the hint from the agent who was telling me all I had to do was offer a tiny bit more. You live and learn.
Deep Learning (by Aaron Courville, Ian Goodfellow, and Yoshua Bengio)
Read cover to cover, then applied these techniques to Crypto Markets (turns out, crypto markets are pretty inneficient)
Interesting. Do your trading strategies still work, or has the market become too efficient? Did you ever trade in a bear market, and by how much did you beat returns on holding just BTC and ETH?
We have experience trading since march 2020, so no proper experience in a bear market. We deployed our first algos with nontrivial amounts (> 100usd) the night before the march crash. And yes we did get rekt that night :)
Trading strategies work. That it still works is a huge mystery to me. We did beat BTC, we have no long/short bias, and are doing the best during volatile periods (up or down)
I assume if you had consistent success you were doing more than time series forecasting on prices. Any chance you can elaborate a bit about what were the model inputs and outputs?
I hate reading comments like this because it always causes me to waste a week dabbling in jupyter notebooks with bitcoin data before realizing it's probably far too much work for me. Happens every 10 months, on average. I know it's 99% data cleansing to arrive at a "true" price through the noise. How to do that, I don't know.
Before that, I had a strong interest in AI & ML, read the Deep Learning book and did the cs231n mooc. So I could train basic neural networks with pytorch but that was it.
Liar's Poker. It spurred my interest in investing topics, which made me take the phone call from a D. E. Shaw & Co. recruiter, which gave 25 year-old me's income a step-function up and an increase in the slope over time.
It's also an amazingly enjoyable and engaging read.
It's maybe tenuous. I certainly wasn't recruited by them because I read the book almost a decade earlier, but I answered their call and listened to their pitch because of it.
It was the first book I read on investing (if you can call it that) and got me interested in the general topic. That led me to consuming a lot more information on the subject and knowing who/what D. E. Shaw was when they called in 1997. I'd have turned them down just like all the other recruiters who would dial all of our extensions in numerical order back then. (You could literally hear the phones ring in sequence as sourcers just called all the phones and didn't even know who was on the other end. They just knew we had a bunch of programmers and placing programmers was easy and paid well.)
Reading the book [and subsequent books] probably did help me to have a better grasp of the subject of trading during the interviews, so in that regard it also helped indirectly.
Options as a Strategic Investment by Lawrence G. McMillan introduced me to the wonderful world of selling covered calls on my long term holds as well as many of the ins and outs of options wrangling in general.
I (a musician) once bought a book called "The Art of Self-Promotion for Musicians", written by an ex-musician! and have since noticed similar phenomena in many fields e.g. bloggers blogging about the courses they sell on making money by blogging etc.
p.s. There was a talk in my city once about making money as a musician...but I couldn't afford the entry fee.
Before the internet, you'd see ads in the paper or back of magazines on how to make $200/week stuffing envelopes. The jist was take out an ad in the paper charging people 5$ for info on how to make money stuffing envelopes.
Learning the basics of accounting goes a long way too.
Unfortunately, you also need to read up a little bit on the gory details of taxes and deductions, pension schemes, etc in your country, and that stuff changes all the time, so the books and knowledge rapidly gets out of date - you want to try not to get distracted by the minutiae of that, and focus on accounting, assets and liabilities, income and expenses.
Steer clear of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It is a fun read, and it does contain some good advice. But the author lies about his past, and the origin and quantity of his wealth, and the book also contains dangerous and illegal advice.
I suggest The Millionaire Next Door as a better book.
I'm sorry but no. I read a lot of books where the narrative is a lie in order to tell a story. It does not make the message wrong.
I also read Rich/Poor dad around 18 and it had a profound impact. I understood how should I think about money, I understood what cashflow is, how companies different from simple humans in terms of tax and a tonns of stuff like that. It's just a good introduction to basic finance for those who don't have a clue.
Seems you fail to grasp that the overwhelming majority of business ventures are destined to fail. It's the production of successful and profitable ventures that matter.
Read about Walt Disney's bankruptcies and failures. Should we conclude the same about him?
Good book I'm reading now is "Invent & Wonder" -The collected writings of Jeff Bezos.
A whole lot of the ventures or projects explored by Amazon were complete failures and lost money. Says to embrace it. The winners more than make up for the losers.
The few times I've encountered people talking about Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was in the context of religious people taking the point of the book to be that "science" thinks one thing for a long time, until it suddenly doesn't, and then suddenly "science" thinks another, different thing when some rebel comes along with new ideas (e.g. Copernicus and heliocentrism), and then they use this gloss as a justification to ignore any science that contradicts whatever weird beliefs they're currently defending.
Not to suggest this is what's happening in this case, but "religion" was the first thing that popped into my mind when contemplating how one might attempt to make a lot of money from ideas in that book.
But I might just have had bad luck in my encounters with people talking about Kuhn and his book.
It was so long ago and I forgot the book’s name. But the gist of it is the reason why most advice fails is they assume we can devote all of our time to advice X. Most of us have extremely busy lives. Our energy. Our time. Our focus is our most precious asset. We need to carefully manage it. At the same time we have to prevent falling into an echo chamber and always honestly be willing to listen to differing opinions even if we disagree with them.
91 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadBut "Investing for Dummies" teached me many valuable lessons. I read it when I was ~15 so it was my first insight into economics, business, and investing. It's well written and digestable.
Read through it, worked many of the examples. Had a 20 bump in salary.
I was a competent programmer and a Linux user, but system stuff always seemed like black magic.
With this book I was able to tackle much harder problems
Like learning assembly, sometimes it’s not directly useful, but it does make you write better code; since you understand more of what’s under the hood.
Never turned much of profit at the poker table, but the life-lessons in that book have been invaluable.
I'm in the same boat. I often wonder how negotiations go where both sides have read the book and use the same tactics...
I think I remember this book as basing your negotiation off of what both sides value. This should lead to near-fair value for both sides. Of course that's not going to happen often (if ever) in the real world. I think the book even mentioned that its strategy is still valid even if the other side has read it.
It's also an amazingly enjoyable and engaging read.
It was the first book I read on investing (if you can call it that) and got me interested in the general topic. That led me to consuming a lot more information on the subject and knowing who/what D. E. Shaw was when they called in 1997. I'd have turned them down just like all the other recruiters who would dial all of our extensions in numerical order back then. (You could literally hear the phones ring in sequence as sourcers just called all the phones and didn't even know who was on the other end. They just knew we had a bunch of programmers and placing programmers was easy and paid well.)
Reading the book [and subsequent books] probably did help me to have a better grasp of the subject of trading during the interviews, so in that regard it also helped indirectly.
From negotiations to strategy my boy Sun Tzu has never let me down.
On the other hand, writing and selling a wealth creation book could work. Better to sell the miners their shovels than be a miner yourself.
p.s. There was a talk in my city once about making money as a musician...but I couldn't afford the entry fee.
It's by no means a great book, but it covers the basics, it's accessible, and I read it at just about the right time around 18 years of age.
Something better / more modern might be:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317640/the-index-ca...
Learning the basics of accounting goes a long way too.
Unfortunately, you also need to read up a little bit on the gory details of taxes and deductions, pension schemes, etc in your country, and that stuff changes all the time, so the books and knowledge rapidly gets out of date - you want to try not to get distracted by the minutiae of that, and focus on accounting, assets and liabilities, income and expenses.
I suggest The Millionaire Next Door as a better book.
A good takedown of Rich Dad from John T Reed:
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-invest...
I also read Rich/Poor dad around 18 and it had a profound impact. I understood how should I think about money, I understood what cashflow is, how companies different from simple humans in terms of tax and a tonns of stuff like that. It's just a good introduction to basic finance for those who don't have a clue.
Easier to sell get rich quick advice than to actually get rich it seems.
Read about Walt Disney's bankruptcies and failures. Should we conclude the same about him?
https://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/5535/marketing/...
A whole lot of the ventures or projects explored by Amazon were complete failures and lost money. Says to embrace it. The winners more than make up for the losers.
The few times I've encountered people talking about Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was in the context of religious people taking the point of the book to be that "science" thinks one thing for a long time, until it suddenly doesn't, and then suddenly "science" thinks another, different thing when some rebel comes along with new ideas (e.g. Copernicus and heliocentrism), and then they use this gloss as a justification to ignore any science that contradicts whatever weird beliefs they're currently defending.
Not to suggest this is what's happening in this case, but "religion" was the first thing that popped into my mind when contemplating how one might attempt to make a lot of money from ideas in that book.
But I might just have had bad luck in my encounters with people talking about Kuhn and his book.
A handful of core rules presented as friendly parables.
Bad title, but this helped me to automate saving and put my energy into more important things.