'Finance Know How'- Book Recommendations by Jalaj Jain

By Jalaj Jain and Vishnu Vinjam

This was long overdue. An exhaustive list of books that Jalaj Jain, our Vice President Finance, in-house George Soros and stock-market guru keeps in his digital library. This comes as a follow up to “Finance Know How” session we had in March, where Jalaj discussed basic concepts and misconceptions about personal finance and investing with the recent graduates in the group.

Here is Jalaj with his top 10 picks and why he thinks they are the best to start with:

1. When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
   
2. One up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
   
3. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Gordon Malkiel and Burton Malkiel
   
4. Inside the Black Box by Rishi K. Narang
   
5. Trend following by Michael Covel
   
6. Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager
   
7. Financial risk modelling and portfolio optimization with R by Bernhard Pfaff
   
8. Winning Algorithmic Trading systems by Kevin Davey
   
9. How I became Quant by Richard R. Lindsey
   
10. George Soros, 2008 Financial Crisis by George Soros
    

I have been involved in Indian stock market for the last 8 years and it has been a life changing experience to analyze so many business organizations serving over a billion people in India. The books which I suggest as must read are for novice as well as experienced professionals willing to enter the finance market. If one is looking to be a full time professional, “How I Become Quant” is an excellent book, with many chapters devoted to experiences of Wall Street Quant professionals. From an engineering point of view, “Winning Algorithmic Trading systems” & “Inside the black box” serve as foundation stones for developing algorithmic platforms to analyze massive financial data sets. Although authors don’t reveal their master algorithms, the approaches they suggest along with state of the art machine learning techniques can be a good starting point for writing winning algorithmic frameworks.

In general, stock market is all about sentiment analysis (75% of the time). Roger Lowenstein’s well written book “When Genius Failed” reveals this fact analyzing how some of the best talent in computer science couldn’t win over the market participants and failed in stock market, resulting in massive erosion of investors’ capital. Legendary investor George Soros’ book on 2008 financial crisis is a must read to understand the globalized world of financial markets. George Soros’ philosophy is that the bubble in stock market is a realization of ground reality vs investor’s myth.

To sum up, the suggested books cover wide range of topics in financial stock market and serve as good foundation for those willing to start as retail investors. Also I strongly believe that stock market is not meant to let you become rich overnight. On the contrary it is all about being patient, thoughtful and keeping calm at irrational times. 

- Jalaj Jain

Jalaj would love to hear your comments about the books. Questions are more than welcome and can be addressed by commenting here or by mailing Jalaj personally at '[email protected]'