Investing--the commitment of resources to achieve a return--affects individuals, families, companies, and nations, and has done so throughout history. Yet until the sixteenth century, investing was a privilege of only the elite classes. The story behind the democratization of investing is bound up with some of history's most epic events. It is also a tale rich with lessons for professional and everyday investors who hope to make wiser choices.

This entertaining history doubles as a sophisticated account of the opportunities and challenges facing the modern investor. It follows the rise of...

The 2008 financial collapse, the expansion of corporate and private wealth, the influence of money in politics--many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance.

Edward Morris plots in absorbing detail Wall Street's transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power. His book begins with J. Pierpont Morgan, who ruled the American banking system at the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with Sandy Weill, whose collapsing Citigroup...

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's visionary vice chairman and Warren Buffett's indispensable financial partner, has outperformed market indexes again and again, and he believes any investor can do the same. His notion of "elementary, worldly wisdom"--a set of interdisciplinary mental models involving economics, business, psychology, ethics, and management--allows him to keep his emotions out of his investments and avoid the common pitfalls of bad judgment.

Munger's system has steered his investments for forty years and has guided generations of successful investors. This book presents...

When an investor believes a stock is overvalued and will soon drop in price, he might decide to "short" it. First, he borrows an amount of the stock, and then sells it. He waits for the stock to tank before buying back the same amount of shares at a deflated price. After returning the shares to his lender, he pockets the difference--unless any one of several hard-to-predict variables interferes, and the stock fails to drop.

Since these variables are so hard to predict, short selling is difficult for even seasoned investors. It takes great talent and experience to isolate the best short...

Where are the next decade's greatest investment opportunities? Veteran investor Marko Dimitrijevic argues that they can be found in frontier markets, which account for seventy-one of the world's seventy-five fastest-growing economies and 19 percent of the world's GDP. Yet many investors ignore them. Fueled by new access to technology and information, frontier markets are emerging even faster than their predecessors, making them an essential component of a globally diversified portfolio.

In Frontier Investor, Dimitrijevic shows through colorful case studies, compelling charts, and...

How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not? Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver...

Investing--the commitment of resources to achieve a return--affects individuals, families, companies, and nations, and has done so throughout history. Yet until the sixteenth century, investing was a privilege of only the elite classes. The story behind the democratization of investing is bound up with some of history's most epic events. It is also a tale rich with lessons for professional and everyday investors who hope to make wiser choices.

This entertaining history doubles as a sophisticated account of the opportunities and challenges facing the modern investor. It follows the rise of...

The 2008 financial collapse, the expansion of corporate and private wealth, the influence of money in politics--many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance.
Edward Morris plots in absorbing detail Wall Street's transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power. His book begins with J. Pierpont Morgan, who ruled the American banking system at the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with Sandy Weill, whose collapsing Citigroup...

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's visionary vice chairman and Warren Buffett's indispensable financial partner, has outperformed market indexes again and again, and he believes any investor can do the same. His notion of "elementary, worldly wisdom"--a set of interdisciplinary mental models involving economics, business, psychology, ethics, and management--allows him to keep his emotions out of his investments and avoid the common pitfalls of bad judgment.

Munger's system has steered his investments for forty years and has guided generations of successful investors. This book presents...

As consumers, our access to--and appetite for--information about what and how we buy continues to grow. Powered by social media, increasingly we look at the companies behind the products and are disappointed when their actions do not meet our expectations. With engaged citizens acting as 24/7 auditors of corporate behavior, one formerly trusted company after another has had their business disrupted with astonishing velocity in the wake of what, in the past, might have been written off as a bad media cycle. Gone are the days when a company could hide behind "socially responsible" branding or...