Best Reads of 2024

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Once again, I fell short of my reading goals for 2024, clocking in just 17 books for the year (1 per week remains the lofty goal!). I found grinding through investment and business-related books a bit of a chore, and instead I read a lot more fiction last year – Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, Frank Herbert. However, I did finish some good non-fiction works that I thought I would share.?

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The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by French economist Thomas Philippon.

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Along with the Austrian school, I find myself drawn to French economists today and their criticisms of American “capitalism". I say “capitalism” in quotes, because as Philippon argues, real capitalism isn’t what we have anymore – we have limited competition, regulatory capture and oligopolies dominating all sectors more today than at any point in the last century, to such extent that our economy hardly resembles free markets. The gains from economic activity – profits and growth – are increasingly being captured by the few. Now, I’m not quite convinced Europe has done a better job in aggregate, but I agree with Philippon that regulators and legislators need to focus on policies that reduce barriers to entry and increase competition rather than protecting massive incumbents.

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The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban.

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The recently retired head football coach of Alabama, Nick Saban, holds the distinction of being widely considered the greatest college football coach of all time. During his 17-year tenure, the Crimson Tide had a span of 6 national championships in one 12 year-period, and his overall record was a staggering 205-61-1 at the school. In this book, author John Talty gives us an inside view of the culture, discipline, and hard work that went into building that program. A few of the lessons from the book included how Saban created a sense of urgency around everything, how he managed to get buy-in and develop leaders on the team who also owned that same sense of urgency, and how he generated and celebrated short-term wins to consolidate gains and drive even more improvement. This was a great read for anyone interested in building a winning culture.

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How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

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This was the first time I read How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Despite being originally written in 1936, I found the book to be not only extremely relatable, but a very insightful look into human relations. There were way too many nuggets to call them all out, but I’ll just say the chapters on how to handle people, how to make people like you, how to win people over to your point of view, and how to be a leader were well worth the price of admission. I took extensive notes and even typed up a crib sheet for future reference. I can see why some people make a point of reading this book every year; it has sold over 30 million copies for a good reason.

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Pioneering Portfolio Management, by former Yale University Endowment Dale Swenson.

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Pioneering Portfolio Management has been a reference book on my bookshelf for the better part of the last decade-plus, and while I have read parts of it at times, 2024 was the year I dedicated myself to reading it cover-to-cover and taking notes. It absolutely remains the blueprint for how to run long-term pools of capital opportunistically across all asset classes globally, public and private. In an era of all investors trying to copy the so-called Endowment Model for private markets – a model based almost entirely upon what Swensen’s team did at Yale – I think allocators should use this book to model the philosophy and process in place, rather than mechanically replicate the output.