Intelligent Investing: A Guide to the Practical and Behavioural Aspects of Investment Strategy
Guy Fraser-Sampson
Palgrave Macmillan, $57.50

This is a one-stop guide for investment professionals who need to better think through their investment rules, behaviour, or procedures before allocating capital. Many of the world’s investors have never undertaken a proper strategic planning exercise. As a result, asset allocation decisions get taken in a vacuum, with no proper understanding of what sort of investor an organization may be, nor of its target return or investment time horizon. The result is frequently based around a “one size fits all” approach that seeks simply to copy as far as possible what other investors of similar size and geography are doing. Finance author Guy Fraser-Sampson, who has himself held senior investment positions around the world, shows that the process should begin with an honest and thorough analysis of the organization itself, and then consider how its investment objectives may best be met within the confines of its resources, decision structures, and expertise.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Frank Partnoy
Public Affairs, $18.50

What do these scenarios have in common: a professional tennis player returning a serve, a woman evaluating a first date, a naval officer assessing a threat to his ship, and a comedian about to reveal a punch line? In this counterintuitive and insightful work, author Frank Partnoy weaves together findings from hundreds of scientific studies and from interviews with a wide range of experts to craft a picture of effective decision making that runs counter to our brutally fast-paced world.

Regulating Competition in Stock Markets: Antitrust Measures to Promote Fairness and Transparency through Investor Protection and Crisis Prevention
Lawrence Klein, Viktoria Dalko, and Michael Wang
Wiley, $72.00

This book is the most comprehensive study so far on potential risks to the stock market, especially various forms of market manipulation that lead to mania and eventual crisis. Based on litigation cases from international stock markets, and borrowing multidisciplinary findings in the fields of finance, economics, accounting, media studies, criminology, legal studies, psychology, and medicine, this book is the first to provide thorough microlevel regulatory proposals rooted in financial reality. By focusing on securities trading, they apply antitrust measures to limiting monopolistic power that is used for the manipulation of investors’ perception and monopolistic profit. These proposals are quantifiable, adjustable, inexpensive, and can be easily implemented by any securities regulating agency for real-time oversight and daily operations.

Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability
Sanjeev Khagram, Archon Fung, and Paolo de Renzio
Brookings Institution Press, $29.95

Decisions about “who gets what, when, and how” are perhaps the most important that any government must make. So it should not be remarkable that around the world, public officials responsible for public budgeting are facing demands—from their own citizenry, other government officials, economic actors, and increasingly from international sources—to make their patterns of spending more transparent and their processes more participatory. Surprisingly, rigorous analysis of the causes and consequences of fiscal transparency is thin at best. Open Budgets seeks to fill this gap in existing knowledge by answering a few broad questions: How and why do improvements in fiscal transparency and participation come about? How are they sustained over time? When and how do increased fiscal transparency and participation lead to improved government responsiveness and accountability?

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Random House, 2012, $33.00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumours or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but also need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.

Winning the Loser’s Game, Sixth Edition: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing
Charles Ellis
McGraw-Hill, $31.95

The classic guide to winning on Wall Street, completely updated and expanded! Named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books for novice investors, Winning the Loser’s Game, Sixth Edition reveals how stock markets really work and what individuals can and should do to be sure they are long-term winners. It leads readers through the simple steps of setting realistic objectives, deciding on a sensible strategy, and most importantly, sticking with it.

An Introduction to Value-At-Risk
Moorad Choudhry
Wiley, $72.00

The value-at-risk measurement methodology is a widely used tool in financial market risk management. The fifth edition of Professor Moorad Choudhry’s benchmark reference text, An Introduction to Value-at-Risk, offers an accessible and reader-friendly look at the concept of VaR and its different estimation methods, and is aimed specifically at newcomers to the market or those unfamiliar with modern risk management practices. The author capitalizes on his experience in the financial markets to present this concise yet in-depth coverage of VaR, set in the context of risk management as a whole.