Book Review 2021
Another year has finished and it’s time to look back and see what my reading list looked like. Last year I came in at fifteen books with a list mostly comprised of stock trading and financial books. Here is the blogpost from the 2020: https://laimis.medium.com/reading-list-of-2020-b54ecda1e68c
And now to the 2021. Here is a summary from Goodreads:
This year I am at eighteen+ books, and similar to past years, mostly non-fiction and the financial world related. I tried to venture outside of the financial topics but it got boring pretty fast. The crypto world definitely makes a bigger appearance in 2021, and then one fiction book in there too.
Anyway, here is a quick link to each of the books I wanted to highlight for 2021:
I started the year with some fiction, actually re-read the alchemist, and then checked what else the author had written and The Archer showed up in the recommendation list. It was meh, a lot of fluff stuff about one trying to be the best at a certain craft, in this case, archery.
Highly recommended book for parents that want to get some ideas and insights into how the kids brains work, and what would be good parenting techniques to apply to help kids grow up more emotionally stable, confident, and curious people.
Excellent book for those that aspire to be long-term to medium-term investors. The author dives into several categories of investors and highlights why they succeed or fail. One piece of advice that stood out to me is dealing with losing positions. When you find yourself in such a situation, you either have done your research and your thesis is intact and you continue to add to the position or you get out. Don’t sit on it and do nothing. Some would argue that doing nothing is actually a good thing, and I would be OK with that. But the author highlights how if you have a good thesis and the market is not appreciating it just yet, by adding to the position you are accumulating shares at a lower price so when the market catches up — you are rewarded handsomely. Of course, adding to a loser is a sure recipe for the disaster, you better make sure your thesis is right when you do this.
This one was “meh”. I read it because it was super cheap on Kindle and I figured to skim through it to get some ideas. The ideas in there are on point, but it’s so short that you can’t really learn anything in there.
HIGHLY recommended book. You might have a hard time reading it if you think cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are a scam. But if you don’t think that way, or can get past that notion, the book is PACKED with ideas and models that can flip your mind around outside of crypto. One example I can give you is the idea of separating the medium from the content. Just because the medium is expensive, does not mean the content is good. For instance, in the early days of the YouTube and Twitter TV journalist/media world at the time mocked the content because the medium was so cheap: a citizen can just go to a protest scene and take a picture or record a video of what they see. They argued that the content is crap because the medium used to deliver it is cheap. Of course, we know now that the outcome is the same, you get information about a protest delivered to you. What matters is not the production cost, but the quickness of delivery, the depth that a normal person can reach, etc. You will get an instant reaction vs having to wait for CNN to set up shop to deliver the news to you via their expensive satellite tracks, delivered by an overpaid reporter, that's talking into a very expensive camera etc. Twitter, YouTube, bloggers were mocked by the incumbents that focused on the medium (look at this grainy cell phone footage!) and totally missed the boat that their jobs are soon to get eliminated, and compensated significantly less while at the same time the number of reporters exploded as now anyone could become one.
The book is FILLED with examples like that around finances and how you should think about life. It was an eye-opener for me.
For some reason, I remember very little about this book other than that I liked it. Go figure. Looking through my highlights it does have interesting points about being careful in relying too much on past experience. Past experience is useful but it could cloud the critical thinking bits and you can overlook certain points. You need a “no” team whose purpose is to examine how the idea won’t work, or say no to the decisions and provide the ideas around why it’s bad.
I found the author first on youtube via one of his interviews and then looked into him more and saw that he had a book. It does not appear to be a well-known or much-read book but I thought it was pretty good for some people that might not have the best relationship with money and wealth. The main message is that everyone deserves wealth, wealth is beneficial to individuals and society, we are better off when we acquire it and feel safe. That sort of thing…
I feel like I completely missed the early train on decentralized finance and read this book about a year too late. Oh well, it was still interesting to see what was being recommended and talked about before DeFi exploded in how much money was poured into various blockchain-hosted apps that focused on finance. Just look at this chart that shows total money locked in various DeFi protocols in the last 3 years, the arrow shows when this book was released:
That’s how early it was …
I picked this one up to take a break from the serious topics of finances and whatnot. I always loved sports books and this one looked very promising based on the reviews. But what happened while reading this book is the realization I had that I am just no longer that much into the sports world and no longer find it that fascinating. It definitely looks like a great book and if you still love sports, it will be great. But I had a hard time going through it and ended up not finishing it.
This one was really interesting and thought-provoking. I would only recommend it if you have been trading stocks for a while. This is not a how-to guide but a fictional story with advice that has utility in the real world: how much trading and working in finances is all about protecting your mental capital and developing an understanding that trading is an emotional arena as much as it is mathematical. Your decisions are influenced by your emotions.
This was a great read, highly recommended for someone who is past the stage of knowing various cryptocurrency names and their prices and wants to look deeper into how things work. It’s kind of fascinating what networks like Ethereum are trying to build.
An autobiography that will feel close to someone who tried to make it in betting be it in casinos or sports and pivoted to the financial world. Of course, Thorp is a legend and a man that spend countless hours mastering his art and we can’t compare ourselves to him — he seems just one of a kind genius that actually acted on his ideas to the max and lived an interesting life as a result.
Another DeFi book, but this one is published in May of 2021. If you refer to the DeFi graph above, the total value locked by that date was more than half of what it is today, so it’s not an early print for sure. It was interesting to read what sort of DeFi applications are being discussed and recommended.
I have been holding off reading this book for over a year. And I can say I am glad that I did. I don’t think I would have appreciated its message if I had not traded/operated in the stock world for a bit. It’s definitely not for beginners. At least I know I would not have appreciated its message if it was one of the first books I had read on the subject of trading stocks. Similar to “Market Mind Games” this book emphasizes the psychology of trading above all else. You have to have an edge, a mathematical edge of some sort in the markets, but then to take advantage of it you have to have a strong psychological base or otherwise, it can be difficult to execute your edge. This book reminded me how much the market individual outcomes are random. A single outcome truly can be one where “anything can happen” and you can’t delve into a single event too much. You do have to find a probabilistic edge and then execute it many times to see that edge manifest itself in the bottom line.
It’s a bit of a sobering read, especially if you don’t have hard defined edge and have been potentially just getting lucky by the “lifting tide” of ever-increasing market stock prices.
Meh, it was kindle recommendation that was cheap to take a look at. Nothing special, your run-of-the-mill self-improvement motivational book that contains one man’s description of what worked for him and it might work for you, or it might not.
I finished the year with this book as I continuously hear about blocksize wars in bitcoin and never truly understood what it was all about. It was fascinating to see how much detail the author had written down and tracked during the “war” where the bitcoin community of developers and miners were split on certain protocol changes. It was fascinating to follow how it all played out and it also reminded you how bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency project, depends so much on its development teams agreeing on decisions.
So there you have it. That’s the 2021 list. 18+ of books read, not all on this list as some I just skimmed through it. In general, I am happy with the list, happy that I stuck with the reading and feel like I am continuing to learn and learn and learn and learn, and actually get to apply some of what I learn. That’s the best part of reading non-fiction books. Read about a topic, and then try to apply it, see what happens.
Anyway, here is to a good 2022 reading year to all.
