Book recommendations?

Hi all,

I am a current junior with a S&T internship lined up this summer at a firm with macro-oriented business lines. Does anyone have any good book recommendations? Anything you read that you wish you had known before you started your job, or a book that was instrumental in your career? If any seasoned people see this, I would love to see your book recs too. I am specifically interested in commodity and FX, as I struggle a lot to understand those two markets. I've already read More Money Than God, but please drop your recs! Thank you!

16 Comments
 

I'm still in college but I'm also interested im Fx/commods. Some good ones are: Lehman brothers FX guide, big debt crisis by ray dalio (more macro), Oil 101 if youre interested in oil, global macro trading by gliner is a good primer. The world for sale ive been told is good too. Most of these recommended by guys in the industry. Check out below for fx market structure (guy from the merc recommended)

https://www.bis.org/publ/work1094.htm

 

Still a student but Interest Rate Markets by Siddhartha Jha is a great starting point to understanding the broader rates/macro space (not as much focused on FX, but rates and FX are quite intertwined so you'll find some similarities when reading this book). For FX, I would just go on google scholar and find white papers for what you're looking for - a lot of great resources out there. If you want a book on analysis within the fixed income/macro space on a rather granular level, I'd recommend Relative Value Analysis by Huggins and Schaller. While it focuses moreso on RV, it offers a solid explanation/intro to the models often used in the macro space, as well as in-depth explanations of products such as swaps.

The above books are rather "educational" so would recommend taking notes while reading them, but Inside The House of Money is a book full of interviews with macro traders and is a enjoyable, easy read that allows you to see inside the mind/thought processes of successful traders 

 

agree that Huggins/Schaller RV is a good read but a lot of it will go over the heads of most undergrad biz majors. Would recommend picking Strang's lin alg first and know what an eigenvector is before reading

 
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I read a bunch of books in 2024 but here are some that stood out:

1. When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi): Incredible story about perseverance and a proper meditation on death from a doctor's perspective

2. The Road (Cormac McCarthy): One of the classics by one of the best

3. Recursion (Blake Crouch): Solid sci fi and creative storytelling

4. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho): Again, one of the classics and some great philosophy to integrate into your life

5. Red Rising (Pierce Brown): Dystopian/sci fi, but great examples of leadership, warfare, class/status, and interpersonal relationships

I don't care what any of the hardos on this site say any time one of these threads is posted. But I've interviewed people enough to know that if you read books like this instead of rolling into my office having read Taleb's Incerto for the fifth time, I'll know you're a human being that I can talk to instead of an NPC that reads every Michael Lewis book like it's the holy grail of finance. (And yes I've read Michael Lewis and Taleb as well, I enjoyed them, and also recommend those books).

 

Seconding the sentiment that non-finance books can still help someone's career and also using this comment as a thread to drop non-finance books i enjoyed this year.

1. Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Collection)

2. Existentialism is a Humanism

3. Blood Meridian

4. The Invention of Morel

5. Anything by Vonnegut or Murakami lol

 

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