第一本书： Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst, by Daniel Reingold
这本书的作者在1995-2002年间是电话通讯行业顶尖的两个分析师之一，与他竞争的另一个分析师 Jack Grubman 后来因为发布欺骗性研究报告被SEC终生逐出金融行业，并罚款1500万美元。
当时 Grubman 和 Reingold 对于通讯行业的股票来说可谓是一言九鼎， Grubman 与公司管理层勾结并拼命向投资者推荐的两家公司 Worldcom 和 Global Crossing 均以破产告终。Reingold 往往与 Grubman 意见相左，他是最终对得起自己良心的那个。
Reingold 在这本书的最后说“个人投资者不应当买卖个股”（"Individuals should not be buying individual stocks.")这与我的观点不谋而合。他书中写的一个例子是，当他组织十来个大型对冲基金的经理们与一家公司的 CFO 面对面开会时，CFO 在回答问题的时候把本季度销售额的增长幅度从14.5%-15.5%下调到13.5%-15.5%之间，话还没说完，好几个基金经理就开始在 Blackberry 上给他们的交易员发信息开始大卖股票，股价暴跌但那个房间外面的人却根本不知道为什么。
推荐感兴趣的人阅读这本书。
Dan Reingold was a Managing Director and telecom analyst for fourteen years at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse First Boston. He was ranked number one or number two by Institutional Investor magazine for most of his career. Prior to that he was a financial executive at MCI. He has been profiled in Barron's; frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek; and interviewed on TV, including CNBC and Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser. Reingold is currently Project Director for Telecom Finance at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia's Graduate School of Business.
"Last and most important, investors need to be aware that they're playing a loser's game. No matter what laws or rules are changed, the investment banking and brokerage businesses are fraught with inherent and inevitable conflicts, conflicts that can hurt even the biggest investors. Rather than trusting in the inherent fairness of the markets, individuals buying stocks should assume that they will never receive the same information as the professionals. It's an insider's world, and it always will be." (Page 301)
"Individuals should not be buying individual stocks. I know this is a radical statement, especially coming from a guy who researched individual stocks for a living. But there are simply too many insiders with too many unfair advantages. Biased research or not, insider trading or not, the markets are, and will remain, rampant with uneven information flow. Some privileged and talented professionals will always receive or ferret out information earlier than everyone else. To be an investor in this environment is like being a drug-free athlete whose competitors are all juiced up on steroids." (Page 313)
"Individual investors should assume that the information and advice they receive regarding individual stocks are stale and, to a large degree, already incorporated into stock prices. Even the majority of professional investors find the deck is stacked against them, since it is only a minority of well-connected, high-commission paying, deal-absorbing institutions that receive the favored information flow." (Page 314)
第二本书： A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, by Richard Bookstaber
这本书的作者在华尔街是风险管理（Risk management）方面的大牛人之一，读读下面的作者简介就知道了。
书里面让人印象深刻的是他用蟑螂这个生物作为风险管理原则的比喻，蟑螂在经过了很多个世纪还能够存活下来的原因就是有一个最简单的避险措施，一有任何风吹草动就马上逃跑，而其它为了更好地适应复杂多样的环境分化得非常细致的生物却都灭绝了。作者的意思是，要想在变幻莫测的金融市场里长期地生存下去，投资和风险管理策略必须一目了然，简单易行。
这本书的有些内容比较晦涩难懂，需要有一定的金融和风险管理专业知识才能读下去。
Richard Bookstaber is Senior Policy Adviser to the Director at the SEC, in the Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation.
He is the author of A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007). The book was prescient in laying out the sources of the current crisis: leverage, tight coupling and the complexity from innovative product.
Bookstaber worked at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, until the end of 2008, and before that ran the Quantitative Equity Fund at FrontPoint Partners. He was in charge of risk management at Moore Capital Management, another hedge fund with over $10 billion in assets.
He served as the managing director in charge of firm-wide risk management at Salomon Brothers and was a member of Salomon's powerful Risk Management Committee. Bookstaber also spent ten years at Morgan Stanley, first designing and marketing derivative instruments, then as a proprietary trader, and concluding his tenure there as Morgan Stanley's first market risk manager.
In addition to A Demon of Our Own Design, he is the author of three other books and scores of articles on finance topics ranging from option theory to risk management. He has won the Graham and Dodd Scroll from the Financial Analysts Federation and the Roger F. Murray Award from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance for his research.
Bookstaber was named to this year’s Conde Nast Portfolio 25 list of technical innovators, in the company of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Eric Schmidt.
He recently testified in the Senate on derivative regulation, and has also testified before both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee on the current financial crisis and required regulatory reform.
Bookstaber has a Ph.D in Economics from M.I.T.
Wisdom of the cockroach
So the problem, in sum, is Wall Street's tendency to `overadapt' to every appealing landscape it encounters, building up complexity and leverage to dangerous levels in doing so.
Bookstaber's suggestion is to heed the wisdom of the cockroach.
The cockroach has survived a longer time span, and a wider variety of harsh environments, than humans could ever match. It is one of the creatures man cannot wipe out no matter how hard he tries. And yet, the cockroach's key risk management strategy is embarrassingly simple... simpler, even, than putting in a stop loss. The deeper point is that simple equals robust; by refusing to get fancy, and sticking with the tried-and-true, the cockroach ensures its reign as champion survivor.
Bookstaber uses the cockroach (and other examples from nature) to argue that we, too, should consider cutting back on our excessively specialized ways. The cost of a rough-edged strategy is forgoing excess profits in accomodative environments... but the benefit is increased likelihood of survival in a much wider range of environments, including the truly harsh ones. (As Jim Grant likes to joke, if so many of these credit-driven vehicles can barely handle prosperity, how are they supposed to fare when adversity hits?)
第三本书： Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers, by Jared Dillian
你要是想了解华尔街投行里交易员的职场生活，这本书是个活生活现的写照。作者本来在海岸警备队供职，因为向往通过交易发财致富的目标，退职读了MBA，在2001年911事件的时候被李曼兄弟公司雇为股票交易员，专门做ETF产品的 Market maker，直到2008年公司破产，作者中间还因为患上精神分裂症入院治疗了一段时间。
这本书很写实，就像是作者写下来刚刚发生的事情那样。推荐感兴趣的人阅读。
Jared Dillian grew up in southeastern Connecticut in the eighties and nineties, became a Coast Guard officer and spent some time at sea. While in the service, he developed a passion for finance, attended business school, and secured a job as a trader at Lehman Brothers. He joined the firm in 2001, shortly before 9/11, and left at the bankruptcy in 2008. STREET FREAK is the story of those years. He now publishes a financial market newsletter from South Carolina: The Daily Dirtnap.
This book is a gloves off, brutally honest account of what life is like working on Wall St. Dillian nails it by not hiding a thing about his experience and being brave enough to tell the world his perspective from the "dark side." Anyone who has worked in a sales or trading function, buy or sell side, will appreciate reading this piece. In addition, if you have no connection with Wall St other than the picture that politicians have painted by berating the group, I think this book will help shape your opinion. There is a lot of baggage that comes along with working on the Street that most people are not fully aware of and Street Freak gets to the heart of many of these conflicts.
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