The last thing you read that blew you away

With half the market about to fly somewhere warmer for a week or two, now seemed like a good time for some holiday reading lists.

I regularly get the opportunity to pose questions to our contributing fund managers as part of our Q&A series, always finishing by asking: "What was the last thing you read that blew you away?" 

I've pulled their collective responses together here for some book-shopping inspiration. There are eleven books (including a trilogy), as well as an article, podcast and an awesome video presentation (the one from Tony Seba). Topics cover markets, but there is just as much Sci-fi, History and Tech in there too. 

I hope you find it useful, and please use the comments box to nominate anything you have read recently that impressed you. 

'Principles', Ray Dalio

Recommended by: James Abela, Fidelity Future Leaders Fund. 

Ray Dalio's 'Principles' book for me is a real stand out as a piece of literature. And the two key things, one is radical transparency, because I think for me as I've gone through life and investing, radical transparency for me is kind of the truth will set you free. Especially in finance, and with accounting and numbers. So radical transparency is certainly a very strong belief that I have.

And then also the fact that lessons are basic and failure is how you learn and develop.

And reading Dalio and being a big fan of Michael Jordan has certainly led me to a place where in my mind failure, as both of them say, is how you learn. And your ability to handle failure determines the probability of you being successful and learning. And then your ability to culminate that learning into being successful is the key.

And then once you are successful, your ability to manage your ego, manage your temperament will basically drive the duration of how long you will be successful for.

And that for me is what I've learned from Dalio and being a Michael Jordan fan for years. Just that lessons learned become probability for success. They're the ingredients, but your ability to be successful and hold that success for years or decades, is a function of managing your own ego and self-awareness, and basically personality and temperament. And that allows you to be successful for a long period of time. So for me that book had a lot of brilliance in it, and I recommend it to anyone. It's great.

'Superforecasters', Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner; and 'A brief history of Germany'

Recommended by: Nick Kirrage, Schroder Global Recovery Fund

I tend to try and read one investment book and one non-investment book after another.

On the investment side, I read 'Superforecasters', which is written by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner and it's an extraordinary book. For those who haven't read it, the science behaviourally around how you are able to put together and think about future outcomes and the probabilities around that, and the kind of people and the kind of traits and attributes they have, and the way they think that enables them to be radically better - and as teams as well.

So this is something that's obviously pretty prescient if you think about it, most investors aren't just an island, they work as part of teams, how do you get the best out of teams without getting the worst out of teams, the worst behavioural aspects of teams, the crowding and herding and stuff. Superforecasters is a wonderful book. It's been out a couple of years now but I would recommend it to everyone.

And on the non-investment side, I read A Brief History of Germany, that's an amazing book. I think we all, in the same way when it comes to investing, we think about the world in the last five years. 

That was a book that highlighted to me how Germany was a radically different country just 120 years ago and Europe looked completely different and it made me feel, thinking a bit about the Brexit piece, which I know everyone thinks is absolutely transformational, but made me understand that that is pretty much a speck in the annals of history and that we will, in terms of how we're evolving, and these democracies and these countries, we've got a long way to go and it's worth always, as an investor, standing back and trying to think a bit about the bigger picture.

How Not to Be Wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg

Recommended by: Dr. Suhas Nayak, Allan Gray 

More recently I've read this book called How Not to Be Wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg. It talks a lot about the pitfalls of drawing inferences from data. Unfortunately, I'm, still wrong a lot, but ... it's a good book to read. I think there are some good lessons in there. If you look at statistics, what can you meaningfully say from them? I think there are some really great anecdotes and lessons to keep in mind.

One that springs to mind is an anecdote about World War II. They had these people trying to figure out what to do about aeroplanes that were being hit by German guns. And they had all these planes come back, and they'd look at where all the holes were being found, and they would think about whether they should put more protective covering here or there.

But some clever guy realised that actually they had a very biased sample set, because they weren't seeing any of the planes that had actually crashed. And the ones that had crashed were the ones where the bullet holes were penetrating the engine block, not the ones hitting the wings, or the tail, or whatever. The real protective covering should have been on the engine. And all this analysis of how to protect other parts of the aeroplane didn't really help. Even though you were analysing actual data, the data was biased. So I think that's kind of interesting.