Moontower #172

This is going to be a short issue. I meant to publish it on Thanksgiving and punt on the Sunday letter but I didn’t spend any time in front of a laptop this week.

Instead, I’ll share a file I have been adding to in my private notes for years. It used to be nothing more than a list of quotes but it’s morphed into something of a compass and manual.

I won’t say anything else about it. You can explore it if you like. If you find something useful, take it. If you find stuff you hate, ignore it or tell me. The beliefs are survivors of my internal tournament of ideas but I’m happy to enter your criticism into the coliseum.

Have at it…

Moontower Affirmations and North Stars

Money Angle

You’ll probably get sucked into some online shopping tomorrow. Here are some finance book recs from a great writer who happens to write about investing for the WSJ.

A few other lists of recommendations:

• The Investing Pro’s Library (Moontower)In over 20 years of option market-making, trading, and portfolio management I’ve been fortunate to meet many talented risk-takers. I took the opportunity to ask some of them what the most influential books or papers they have read in their careers.
  

  I asked a cohort of 25 investors. They are CIO’s, PMs, and independent investors whose livelihood depend on the bets they take. Half of the respondents have had an options focus and more than 80% would be classified as quantitative…
  

• For Investing Beginners (Moontower)My 25-year-old cousin is interested in going into the investing world and asked me where to start. He has taken some business courses in college so I was able to presume some very basic knowledge.

Finally, I’ve sent this list of 8 books to 2 separate friends who have middle and high-school-aged kids who wanted to learn about investing, personal finance, business in general, and economic rationale:

Investing

The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein

Just Keep Buying by Nick Maggiulli

The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks

Investing with a personal finance slant

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

Economics and Business

The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance by Russ Roberts
(I took notes on this novel)

The Rebel Allocator by Jake Taylor
(I took notes on this novel)

And because investing is a super low-signal endeavor, you need some protection from the sales machine:

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

If you are a seasoned pro, many of these titles will make you groan. That’s because you are already “cursed with knowledge”. These books are highly approachable and can quickly elevate a total novice’s understanding. The 2 novels are an original and effective way to communicate economic and business contexts by turning the discourse into a conversation instead of a lecture.

If they finished these, I’d recommend Joel Greenblatt’s Little Blue Book That Beats The Market. Not because of the strategy specifics but as a tangible example of process while introducing important business metrics in a usable context.

Last Call

• I’m Pretty Sure I Broke Linkedin: Satire makes for an excellent IQ test (10 min read)Jack Raines has been raising hell over at LinkedIn. This post is hilarious. But Jack’s writing about the culture of LinkedIn is even better than the satire. It’s a perfect-pitch articulation of his observations in the wild that is the LinkedIn timeline. Jane Goodall would be proud.
• Jason Zweig On Writing (11 min read)I mentioned WSJ writer Jason Zweig above. He’s a masterful writer masquerading as a financial columnist. He wrote a 3-part series on the craft of writing. This post captured my favorite takeaways.

   

From My Actual Life

I stayed north of San Diego this past week where my sister’s family, my mom, my dad and my family all convened for vacation. We went to Sea World, hung around the pool, saw a theater performance of the Grinch, and hit up the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park (there was a fantastic exhibit on Galileo…inspiring and a reminder that the breadth of what is going on inside people’s minds is incomprehensible).

The only negative was the underwhelming Korean barbecue we ate on Thanksgiving Day instead of cooking. News flash: Escondido isn’t Flushing, Queens. All in all the trip still delivered — it wasn’t about the excursions.

It was watching reruns of PasswordPlus and SupermarketSweep with my sis (and being shocked at how young some of the contestants were despite their appearance. Seriously, that Cheers meme is a thing. People looked so much older way back when).

It was chatting with my brother-in-law about both his career and personal business while sitting on the balcony. So many decisions that have nothing to do with a spreadsheet. Decisions that would be hard to discuss unless you could match the vulnerability of, well, a brother.

It was listening to my parents, who have been divorced since I was in high school, talk to each other as different people but also the same people.

It was trying to find myself in their stories. How much of them is in me? How much did I keep? How much did I unlearn? Physically speaking, how do I think about my future health when I see their struggles today? I’ve talked about some of my interventions this year. Seeing them is a reminder not to parabolically discount the future. It’s here before you know it.

When I brought my dad back to his apartment I noticed this picture.

Overall, Thanksgiving was a welcome slowing of time. I’m grateful for the time we get. You don’t know what tomorrow’s got. You should live like there’s no tomorrow. Except for that if you do that and tomorrow comes, you’ll wish you lived like you knew it all along.

In the Olympics of unsatisfying paradoxes, this ranks right up there with “I guess I’ll sell half the position”.

Stay groovy.