Robert G. Hagstrom, chief investment strategist and managing director for the Legg Mason Investment Counsel and author of eight investment books, found inspiration for this book in Charlie Munger's notion of a latticework of mental models. This second edition of Investing: The Last Liberal Art (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2013) explores "big ideas" from seven academic disciplines- physics, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literature, and mathematics- to build a latticework that will help us better understand financial markets.

Hagstrom's latticework of mental models is not, of course, definitive. Each person who is willing to invest the intellectual effort required will come up with his own set of models. These models will undoubtedly change over time as he incorporates new ideas (some, I would suggest, seemingly minor or peripheral but nonetheless potentially fertile) and shifts others around. Moreover, the application of these models, which involves metaphoric thinking, will vary from person

It may be an overstatement to describe data analysis as "the sexiest job of the 21st century" (CNBC headline, 6/5/13), but data analysts are definitely in demand. An overwhelming amount of data has been and continues to be collected. These mountains of raw data often seem akin to all that stuff hoarders can't bear to part with, taking up space (though of course not as much as physical junk does) and having no apparent function. Amazon (AMZN) is the ultimate data hoarder, claiming never to throw anything away. After all, you never know when with a new kind of pick and shovel or a better map you just might find gold in them thar hills.

Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) is a terrific book for those who aspire to be

I suppose the first obvious question to ask the author is: What silver bull market? All year the price of silver has been in an inexorable decline and is less than half its $48 2011 peak; it is now at 2010 levels, although admittedly way above its 2001 low of roughly $4 an ounce. Shayne McGuire, a managing director and head of global research at Teacher Retirement System of Texas, may have mistimed The Silver Bull Market: Investing in the Other Gold (Wiley, 2013). But that doesn't mean the book isn't worth reading. In fact, now just might be a prime time to read it. Silver prices are notoriously volatile; they can rebound as easily as they can crater.

What is the logic behind owning silver? First, if you like gold, you should like silver as well; silver's performance is highly correlated to gold's, although its price swings tend

Since 2005, John Heins and Whitney Tilson have published the newsletter Value Investor Insight, which features two in-depth interviews with professional money managers each month. An annual subscription (with access to all the back issues) is $349. Or, for about a tenth the price ($45 retail, $28.58 on Amazon) you can get several years' worth of insights that appeared in the newsletter from a who's who of value investors.

When a foreign political figure was accused of plagiarizing his dissertation, he was mocked with the meme Ph+D = (Ctrl+C) + (Ctrl+V). The Art of Value Investing (Wiley, 2013) is also the product of- in this case totally legitimate- copying and pasting. Although it may not warrant a Ph.D. itself, its readers will get a broad, non-technical education from over a hundred successful practitioners.

The authors divided the book into twelve chapters. They then took snippets from published interviews,

Mark Minervini, U.S. investing champion in 1997, averaged a 220% return per year from 1994 to 2000 for a compounded total return of 33,500%. Yes, we all know that these astonishing figures coincided with a major bull market, but how many traders came anywhere close to his record during this period?

In Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard: How to Achieve Superperformance in Stocks in Any Market (McGraw-Hill, 2013) Minervini shares his SEPA (Specific Entry Point Analysis) trading strategy. It's essentially a trend following/breakout strategy that screens for such variables as earnings surprises and relative strength and that looks for catalysts driving institutional interest. It relies on both fundamentals and technicals. Its focus is on youthful small- to mid-cap stocks.

There are strong echoes of Bill O'Neil, Ben and Mitch Zacks, Richard Donchian, even Jesse Livermore in Minervini's work. That he borrows from such luminaries is not surprising. Having

If your command of economics is either rusty or fuzzy but you don't have the time to sit through three or four semester courses, Economics for Investment Decision Makers: Micro, Macro, and International Economics (Wiley, 2013) might be just the ticket. This 700+-page book by Christopher D. Piros and Jerald E. Pinto is part of the CFA Institute Investment Series. You don't have to aspire to become a certified financial analyst to benefit from the book. It's a good foundational text for every investor.

The book is divided into twelve chapters: (1) demand and supply analysis: introduction, (2) demand and supply analysis: consumer demand, (3) demand and supply analysis: the firm, (4) the firm and market structures, (5) aggregate output, prices, and economic growth, (6)understanding business cycles, (7) monetary and fiscal policy, (8) international trade and capital flows, (9) currency exchange rates, (10) currency exchange rates: determination and forecasting,

Individual traders are often told that they should view their activity as a business. But what exactly does this mean? After all, one business after the other fails; presumably these aren't the best models. Renee and Don Martin, successful entrepreneurs themselves, come to the rescue with The Risk Takers: 16 Women and Men Share Their Entrepreneurial Strategies for Success (Vanguard Press, 2010). No, it's not a new book, but I hadn't read it and I suspect most of you haven't either.

With two exceptions, the entrepreneurs founded their companies -- Curves, Alvarado Construction, Kinko's, Liz Lange Maternity, Geek Squad, The Corcoran Group, World Wide Technology, Build-A-Bear Workshop, John Paul Mitchell Systems, Spanx, Amy's Kitchen, Trilogy, Invacare, Tova, The WW Group (Weight Watchers), and (the author's own) The Cal-Surance Companies. Many -- actually, probably most -- of the entrepreneurs were dreadful students. Many went from rags to riches, and sometimes

Steven Greiner, the author of Ben Graham Was a Quant, which I reviewed two years ago, is back with a new book, Investment Risk and Uncertainty: Advanced Risk Awareness Techniques for the Intelligent Investor (Wiley, 2013). I suppose Greiner could more accurately be described as editor instead of author; although he has written many of the chapters, either alone or with co-authors, he has also enlisted the expertise of his colleagues at FactSet and FactSet's risk vendors.

The subtitle may describe the intended audience as "the intelligent investor," but this book is really directed at the quantitatively savvy investment professional. Few retail investors, intelligent or not, will either have or require the high-level risk modeling and management skills described in this book.

For those who run large portfolios or who otherwise need to know about a broad spectrum of risk management issues, tools, and practical solutions, Greiner's

We are constantly making decisions, operating for the most part on autopilot. But then there are the decisions that are part and parcel of how we manage our ambitions and achieve our goals. These kinds of decisions, the ones that require dealing with opportunities and problems, are the focus of David Wethey's Decide: Better Ways of Making Better Decisions (Kogan Page, 2013). Wethey's own life decisions include a career first as an ad man and now as a client-side consultant. He also writes the blog Making Better Decisions, Better.

Much of Wethey's analysis is set within a business context, where teamwork and "buy-ins" are critical. But five of his six rules for making an important decision in the right way, and then managing it, are applicable to the individual trader and investor as well. To wit, (1) "Every important decision is a journey, not a single step." (2)

Kent Balenthiran's 'The 17.6 Year Stock Market Cycle: Connecting the Panics of 1929, 1987, 2000 and 2007' (Harriman House, 2013) is a difficult book to review. The problem is that in this 91-page book, the author sets forth a single historical and predictive hypothesis. In its broad strokes, the 17.6-year historical hypothesis is not new, as Balenthiran readily admits. I myself have encountered it numerous times. The author provides more granularity, however, which makes his work both more original and more prone to predictive error.

The profile of a bull market cycle resembles an Elliott Wave sequence, although Balenthiran notes that, in contrast to Elliott Waves, his cycle "has distinct phases of fixed time and direction" and "is not trying to determine by how much the stock market may increase or decrease in that time." (p. 30) Nonetheless, his bull market cycle has an initial leg up lasting four

Alternative Investments: Instruments, Performance, Benchmarks, and Strategies, edited by H. Kent Baker and Greg Filbeck (Wiley, 2013), is the latest addition to the Kolb Series in Finance. The books in this series, all hefty (this one is over 600 pages), are collections of papers by both academics and practitioners.

The editors have organized Alternative Investments around the standard offerings: real estate, private equity, commodities and managed futures, and hedge funds. In 28 chapters the book's contributors take the reader on a journey that touches on a wide range of topics, from the introductory to the arcane. The retail investor or the investing professional relatively new to the game can learn about the role of alternative investments in strategic asset allocation and investing in commodities. For the more academically and statistically oriented reader there is an analysis that uses multivariate co-integration techniques to ascertain whether "investors in REITs receive

Invest to Win: Earn and Keep Profits in Bull and Bear Markets with the GainsMaster Approach by Toni Turner and Gordon Scott (McGraw-Hill, 2013) is a deceptively elementary book. Although its largest audience will undoubtedly be newly self-directed investors, even the experienced investor will learn a thing or two.

The GainsMaster approach has four key elements: (1) define your objectives, (2) evaluate market conditions, (3) choose your opportunities, and (4) manage your risk. Since the inputs to these elements vary from person to person and hence require a level of self-knowledge and self-assessment ("Investing strategies need to be built from the inside out"), each chapter in the book concludes with a section that addresses the emotional side of investing.

The authors cover such basics as finding a broker, fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and ETFs. But perhaps their most useful contribution is their analysis of market conditions-whether investors are seeking

Predictive analytics intrudes on our lives every day. Amazon recommends products (sometimes, admittedly, bizarre -- I've received ads for headlights, guitars, and baby diapers), Stop & Shop sends targeted grocery coupons, and the same politician crafts different ads for Republicans and Democrats. Eric Siegel takes the reader into this powerful and potentially troubling world in Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (Wiley, 2013).

The glut of data is growing by "an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes per day (that's a 1 with 18 zeroes after it). ... As data piles up, we have ourselves a genuine gold rush. But data isn't the gold. I repeat, data in its raw form is boring crud. The gold is what's discovered therein" (p. 26-27). Enter predictive analytics, "technology that learns from experience (data) to predict the future behavior of individuals in order to drive better decisions"

If you're not familiar with Jim Rogers' Hot Commodities, Adventure Capitalist, or Investment Biker, or if you're simply a fan of this maverick commodities investor, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets (Crown Business, 2013) is a fast, if sometimes snarky read. It's a combination autobiography/critical commentary.

Rogers, an unabashed fan of China, lives in Singapore with his wife and two young daughters, both of whom speak Mandarin. He believes the sun is rising in the East and, doting 70-year-old father that he is, wants his daughters to be on the winning side of the globe. The economic and innovative glory of the United States is to his mind best described in the past tense. He spends several chapters lambasting everything from the outsized national debt to academic tenure.

The highlight of Rogers' career, at least in popular investing history, was the decade he

I don't normally include subtitles in my article titles, but in this case I've made an exception. Not only did I know nothing of the stock market scandal, I had never even heard of Steel's. So I figured the reader might also need a little help. This new Syracuse University Press book by Dave Dyer, an independent investor, recounts the story of a man, Leonard Rambler Steel, who did "almost everything right. Almost."

Steel was a visionary. He founded his company in the fall of 1919 in Buffalo, at that time a boom town and the eleventh largest city in America. By June 1922, "he had 225 business locations, including sales offices, five-and-dime stores, candy shops, and cafeterias. He had more than forty-five hundred employees and forty thousand investors." He sold stock in the company directly to the public on an installment plan. His idea was not only to raise

Investing primers are a dime a dozen, so what makes Brian Nichols' Taking Charge with Value Investing: How to Choose the Best Investments According to Price, Performance, and Valuation to Build a Winning Portfolio (McGraw-Hill, 2013) worth a look?

To start with, it's an easy read, where stories break up what- almost by definition- is the tedium of measuring value. Second, it goes beyond the metrics of stock selection and deals at some length with the psychology of investing. Nichols also offers an unconventional model of diversification.

"Most of the time," Nichols writes, "an investor's fundamental knowledge is sufficient to return gains, but it's her emotions that get the best of her." He recounts his own early failings. "You may not realize it, but the more engaged you are with your investments, the more likely you are to return a loss. When I first began investing, I was the

Peter Pham has written an engaging book. The Big Trade: Simple Strategies for Maximum Market Returns (Wiley, 2013) is not only an introduction to Excel-based, probabilistic trading strategies but a "blue jeans to BMW and back again" autobiography. (The BMW came from trading, the "back again" from a failed financial media business venture in Vietnam.)

Part of what makes Pham's book a worthwhile read rests with his belief that markets demand humility on the part of the trader. He is not touting strategies that will consistently deliver huge returns. On the contrary, the big trade is, in Pham's opinion, "the one you make that allows you the opportunity to make the next one." (p. 143) The trader's job is to read the state of the market, react decisively based on the probabilities, and keep repeating this cycle. Becoming a great trader requires, in addition to desire and dedication, "practice and

Kevin R. Mirabile's Hedge Fund Investing: A Practical Approach to Understanding Investor Motivation, Manager Profits, and Fund Performance (Wiley, 2013) covers a lot of familiar territory, including the standard fund strategies. But it's more sophisticated and provides more color than the run-of-the-mill hedge fund book, and therein lies its strength.

Mirabile is both a practitioner and an academic, and he tailors his book accordingly. It addresses potential hedge fund investors, professionals, and students. In its (dominant) textbook "personality" it includes discussion questions and problems as well as extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter. It also deals with topics that I suspect most individual investors would find abstruse, such as economies of agglomeration or skills and staffing requirements that are unique to a particular investing style. The individual looking to invest in a hedge fund or a fund of funds would probably doze off part way through the

China's Superbank: Debt, Oil and Influence-How China Development Bank Is Rewriting the Rules of Finance (Wiley/Bloomberg, 2013) by Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe, both Bloomberg reporters working in Beijing, is a fascinating book. Those of us who learn about the Chinese economy only through the standard media outlets have very little idea of how it is being fueled. This book follows the money trail, from the China Development Bank to local Chinese municipalities and to the far corners of the globe (if, that is, the globe actually had corners). The task is daunting since "CDB's assets and lending are a large black hole in global finance. Few other banks have been as unwilling to answer questions from the public…." (p. 178)

CDB, an arm of the state, is financed almost exclusively by bond sales rather than deposits. "It sells bonds to commercial banks, which use people's savings to buy

I often despair about the inordinate number of hours I spend on this blog. Moreover, reading and writing about books that don't engage me is a tedious project- and I really hate tedium. I don't mind wasting time; I'm good at that. But I want to waste my time in a pleasurable way. I bitch and moan and frequently consider ditching the whole project when along comes a book that makes everything worthwhile. Quantitative Value: A Practitioner's Guide to Automating Intelligent Investment and Eliminating Behavioral Errors by Wesley R. Gray and Tobias E. Carlisle (Wiley, 2013) is just such a book.

I guess serendipity must have been at work because Quantitative Value was an unlikely book to capture my imagination. I don't consider myself a value investor and I've admitted more than once that I'm no quant. But this book is a brilliant synthesis not only of the