A blog reader has kindly given me a good list of books that are worth reading. They are as follows:
Banking and Finance
General
- “The City: Inside the Great Expectations Machine” – Tony Golding – easy-to-read discussion of life inside the City
- “The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism” – Philip Auger – history of investment banking and securities broking in London since 1985
- “Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success” – Lisa Endlich - history of the world’s greatest investment bank
Corporate Finance / M&A
- “Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies” – Tom Copeland – classic textbook, quite technical
- “Principles of Corporate Finance – Richard Brearley and Stuart Myers – classic textbook, rather heavy and very technical
- “Big Deal” – Bruce Wasserstein – dauntingly large book, but actually very readable and easy to understand; starts with account of major recent M&A deals, then rteviews the classic M&A / corporate finance services and techniques
- “Barbarians at the Gate” – Bryan Burrough and John Helyar – classic business biography of the take-over of RJR Nabsisco in 1988; a thrilling account of a real deal; reads like a novel
- “Den Of Thieves” – James Stewart – similar in style to ‘Barbarians’, but gives an account of the insider trading in the 1980s that brought down Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert; again reads like a thriller
- “An Introduction to Equities” – Reuters – easy to understand textbook
- “An Introduction to Debt Markets” – Reuters – easy to understand textbook
- “An Introduction to Foreign Exchange and Money Markets” – Reuters – easy to understand textbook
- “How the Bond Market Works” – Robert Zipf - – easy to understand textbook
- “Market Wizards – Interviews with Top Traders” – Jack Schwager – strange book – quite involved and is a compilation of interviews with traders about their trading strategies – for wannabe traders
- “Liars Poker” – Michael Lewis – classic real-life account of Michael Lewis’ career as a bond trader at Salomon in London, where he reported to John Merriweather (see When Genius Failed)
- “FIASCO” – Frank Partnoy – similar to Den of Thieves and Liars Poker but slightly more sensationalist
- “The Collapse of Barings” – Stephen Fay – easy to read account of Nick Leeson’s wrongdoing than brought down Barings in 1995
- “When Genius Failed – The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management” – Roger Lowenstein – true-life account of the rise and fall of the largest hedge fund in the world run by John Merriweather – the star character in Michael Lewis’ Liars Poker
- “The McKinsey Way – Ethan Rasiel – explains the McKinsey approach to solving business problems; more a textbook than a biography of McKinsey
- “Jack – What I’ve Learned Leading a Great Company and Great People” – Jack Welch – the autobiography of the former CEO of General Electric, the largest company in the world
- “Competing for the Future” – Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad – management text on competition and competitive advantage, quite readable
- “The Balanced Scorecard” – Robert Kaplan and David Norton – readable management text on balancing financial and non-financial measurement / control of a company
- “Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control” – Philip Kotler – the classic text on marketing
- “Competitive Advantage” – Michael Porter – the classic text on competitive advantage explain Porter’s model of the “Five Forces”; quite heavy
- “Troubleshooter” – John Harvey Jones – from the 1990s TV series, former CEO of ICI consults to six companies
- The Grocers: The Rise and Fall of the Supermarket Chains” – Andrew seth and Geoffrey Randall – review of the UK’s big supermarkets and how they have consolidated their market positions
Golden Handcuffs: The Lowly Life of a High Flyer (Paperback)
by Polly Courtney (Author)
