One of the things that I love reading about is the continuous spectrum of how the earth was created, which is geology, how societies are formed, which is anthropology, and in the modern-day, how economics works, which is essentially a reflection of society.
It’s almost like a continuous spectrum with these things, and I read stuff from all of that spectrum, particularly behavioural economics. So really, how people think and tick, and how the world happens in unpredictable ways. And my book choice, The Black Swan, is all about the unpredictable.
It was written in 2007, just before the Global Financial Crash (GFC) and it’s amazing to read how the author predicts that.
One of his other books, “Fooled by Randomness”, which is actually an early book from 2001, which I read again just recently, is also about how people don’t price the unexpected.
And because the author is an investor, he needs to think about the unexpected, and the wipeouts, and those types of things.
It’s very, very readable and goes through example after example of how people lose money. And when you look at normalised published returns, all the extremes tend to be filtered out, and you’ve got to base your life around that these things will happen. They happen a lot more than people expect. He’s a terrifically intelligent guy.
