Our Library
We have started a collection of financial books for your reading enjoyment. The books are recommended through the Raymond James Worthwhile Magazine. The title and authors as well as excerpts are listed below. If you are interested in borrowing any of these books please stop by the office.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
By Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton & CO., 2010
"The problem wasn’t that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that the Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed."
"Home prices didn’t even need to fall. They merely needed to stop rising at the unprecedented rates they had the previous few years for vast numbers of Americans to default on their home loans."
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
By Alice Schroeder
Bantam, 2008
"Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy, but don’t think you can outsmart the market"
"Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest."
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster
By Dana Thomas
The Penguin Press, 2007
"By putting an emphasis on the logo and spending more than $100 million a year to advertise it, luxury companies made their brands, rather than the actual products, the objects of public desire."
"...consumers don’t buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent. And good fakes- the kind that can pass for real- now represent socially the same thing as real."
The Rockerfellers: An American Dynasty
By Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976
"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as coffee or sugar,’ Rockefeller (Senior) on remarked, ‘and I pay for that ability than any other under the sun."
"Pocantico (the Rockefellers’ New York estate) was 10 times larger Monaco, five times the size of Central Park."
The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
By Justin Fox
Harper Collins, 2009
"We want to see regular waves in economic data, and therefore we do."
"(We need) to find ways to temper speculative excesses while acknowledging that we won’t necessarily be able to distinguish speculative excess from an entirely sustainable boom."
Your Money and your Brain:
How the New Science of Neuroeconomics can help make you Rich
By Jason Zweig
Simon & Schuster, 2007
"Of 750 investors [surveyed]...74% expected that their mutual funds would ‘consistently beat the S&P 500 every year.’"
"At the most basic biological level, a positive surprise packs a lot less punch than a negative one."
Any opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily those of RJFS or Raymond James.