Ven Reads

A running list of stuff to read whenever you are in need

I have a couple of informal book lists I send out to people, but ideally this is a stickied post which contains categorized books to read (generally, the higher up, the better I consider them), and articles and newsletters I enjoy.

I set up a goodreads profile as well - no idea how often I’ll remember to keep this up to date, though.

Finance Nonfiction

• Trading & Exchanges - Larry Harris (market microstructure)

• Manias, Panics, and Crashes - Charles Kindleberger (market bubbles)

• Black Edge - Sheelah Kolhatkar (insider trading)

• The Smartest Guys in the Room - Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind (Enron)

• The Spider Network - David Enrich (LIBOR rigging)

• The Futures - Emily Lambert (history of futures)

• The Courage to Act - Ben Bernanke (2008)

• Option Volatility & Pricing - Sheldon Natenberg (options)

• The Secret Financial Life of Food - Kara Newman (commodity futures)

• to be continued…

Business Nonfiction

• Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber (econ history)

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Lefevre (Jesse Livermore)

• Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis (meh) (equities in Dallas)

• Bad Blood - John Carreyrou (Theranos)

• Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

• Billion Dollar Loser - Reeves Wiedeman (WeWork)

• Damn, it Feels Good to be a Banker - Leveraged Sellout (satire)

• tbc…

Finance/Business newsletters and blog posts I enjoy

• Money Stuff - Matt Levine (if you’re reading this newsletter and not reading Money Stuff, I concurrently am honored and flummoxed)

• F.T. Alphaville (amusing blurbs, annoying paywalls)

• The Global Capitalist (international/EM macro)

• Scott Locklin on 'Flash Boys' (and why it sucks)

• Zach David's HFT Explainer

• XIV Volpocalypse - Kid Dynamite

• tbc…

Satire and Humor

• Libertarian Police Department

• Moscow to the End of the Line - Venedikt Erofeev

• American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

• Lake Success - Gary Shteyngart

  • excerpt: The Luck of Kokura

• The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster

• Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown

• tbc…

Other nonfiction

• Number - Tobias Dantzig (math history)

• Soviet Chess 1917 - 1991 - Andrew Soltis (Soviet chess history)

• Tiger Woods - Jeff Benedict, Armen Keteyian (the best biography)

• The Trial of Henry Kissinger - Christopher Hitchens (foreign policy)

• White Trash - Nancy Isenberg (American history)

• The Triple Agent - Joby Warrick (Terrorism/Intelligence narrative)

• Endgame - Dominic Lawson (Kasparov Short World Chess Championship)

• tbc…

Literature

• The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (perhaps the most important book ever written)

• The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Moscow-Petushki - Venedikt Erofeev

• Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

• The Vegetarian - Han Kang

• The Idiot - Elif Batuman

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy

• Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

• tbc…

Short Stories, Essays and Novellas

• Omakase - Weike Wang

• Reflections on Gandhi - George Orwell

• The Nose - Nikolai Gogol

• Symbols and Signs - Vladimir Nabokov

• Arguably - Essays by Christopher Hitchens

• Consider the Lobster and other essays - David Foster Wallace

• Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino

• Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Jamil Jan Kochai

• Audition - Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

• tbc…

Other Fiction

• The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

• tbc…

Finance-related papers, cases, and longreads I’ve enjoyed

• The (Mis)Uses of the S&P 500

• Momentum in Imperial Russia

• Ripple SEC Complaint

• Markopolos' Madoff Complaint

• Election Predictions as Arbitrage - a Martingale approach

• Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities

• Goldman Sachs v Libyan Investment Authority

• The Great Swiss Bank Heist

• The Self Destruction of Deutsche Bank

• tbc…

Other papers, cases, and longreads I’ve enjoyed

• What if your Abusive Husband is a Cop? (or anything by Rachel Aviv, really)

• What Really Happened to MH 370?

• The Kitchen Network

• Tanner v U.S.

• tbc…

This is always going to be a work in progress, but I’ll make sure to highlight when I update things… happy reading!