The 12 Best Finance Books in 2023

This 20th anniversary edition of Rich Dad Poor Dad reiterates the book’s central thesis that investors should focus less on their income and more on their expenses. This conversational book, written by Robert T. Kiyosaki, compares the experiences of two fathers: the “rich dad,” a friend’s father who builds a successful business from nothing, and a capitalist, and the “poor dad,” the author’s own father, who spends his entire working life as a highly educated government employee, and a socialist.

Best Cryptocurrency Reference: The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains

True to its subtitle, this book is an entertaining and informative resource for anyone interested in learning more about cryptocurrency. After working as a technologist for Credit Suisse in Singapore and London, Antony Lewis decided to leave the banking industry and instead join the Bitcoin exchange firm iBit.

His book has nine chapters and is filled with illustrations, graphs, tables, pie charts, and infographics to help readers understand the concepts he is discussing. He begins by defining money and moves on to digital money, cryptography, cryptocurrencies, digital tokens, and blockchains. For instance, he proposes rebranding Bitcoin as a “electronic asset” because “the word money often sidetracks people when they are attempting to grasp Bitcoin. They get bogged down trying to figure out who or what controls interest rates or what kind of backing Bitcoin has, neither of which exist.

Investopedia’s senior editor in charge of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Vinamrata Chaturvedi, had this to say about the book: “There are numerous questions we have while thinking about blockchain. You can find the solutions in this book. Explains blockchain’s inner workings and the rationale behind cryptocurrencies as the “financial system of the future.”

While Lewis “loves the industry” of crypto assets, Bitcoin, and blockchains, he also warns of the very real hazards that investors face. Ponzi schemes, phony initial coin offers (ICOs), pump-and-dump schemes, fraudulent mining programs, and counterfeit digital wallets are all detailed in his “Scams” section. It’s true that “people have made and lost fortunes trading cryptocurrencies and investing in ICOs,” but there are also “many risks,” as he points out. Do your homework thoroughly before putting down any cash if you do decide to become involved.

Best for Investing: A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Although Burton G. Malkiel has made significant contributions to finance as a professor of economics, a director at Vanguard, and the former dean of the Yale School of Management, he is best known for his book Random Walk, which was first published in 1973 and is now in its twelfth edition (2019). The green cover shown above will be featured on the 50th anniversary edition, which will be released on January 3, 2023.

Malkiel defines a random walk as a process in which the outcome cannot be determined by looking at the past. The phrase has been defined as “the unpredictability of stock prices over short time periods.” Remember that?

Financial Review Board member and CEO/founder of financial training firm OnPoint Learning Amy Drury gave the book her stamp of approval, saying, “I reread this recently and found that it was a pretty comprehensive overview about finance and investing.” It’s not the kind of book you’d want to bring to the beach because of how dense it is, but it’s fantastic for looking up specific information.

Best Personal Finance Disaster Management: What to Do with Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide

In Michelle Singletary’s personal financial book, you can either read it from cover to cover or jump to the sections that are most relevant to you right now. Using a question-and-answer format, Singletary’s Survival Guide (which grew out of her nationally syndicated personal finance column, “The Color of Money,” for The Washington Post) discusses financial management and crisis response.

Singletary suggests prioritizing expenses when funds are limited, doing things like paying for necessities like food before addressing the remaining debts by negotiating payment plans with creditors. Her book is amazing because it can be used by everyone, from those with plenty of money who nevertheless live beyond their means to complete novices in the realm of personal finance.

The “Resources” section provides a directory of groups and businesses that can provide additional assistance to consumers in need. Marguerita M. Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth and member of the Investopedia Financial Review Board, calls the book “very timely, relevant, practical, and helpful.”

Best Global Perspective: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

A layperson hearing the phrase “silk roads” could picture exotic locations with shimmering silk cloth. The truth is very different from that. Professor of global history at Oxford University Peter Frankopan’s 2015 book tells the story of courageous merchants, middlemen, soldiers, and leaders who, over the course of several centuries, traversed perilous terrain in the Middle East, China, the Balkans, and South Asia, facing such hazards as erratic weather, hostile locals, violent criminals, deadly diseases, and religious missionaries from a variety of faiths.

When other commodities, like grain, failed as a global currency, silk stepped in. Over the years, some cities thrived while others fell into disrepair. Of course, all of this was done for business reasons.

“The Silk Roads refocuses our attention on a region that has always and will always play a critical (and defining) role in the global economy,” says David M. Roth, CEO of Wakaya Group, former director of FIJI Water in Fiji, and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD. Frankopan also aids in placing current events into the larger scope of human history. It’s about the economy, to use a phrase from [Democratic political operative] James Carville.

The New Silk Roads: Asia in the Post-Western World (Vintage, 2018) is Frankopan’s follow-up. 

Best on the Dangers of the Gender Data Gap: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

This fascinating book by British journalist and activist Caroline Criado Perez explains how the data gender gap contributes to disadvantages for women around the world, costing businesses and governments a lot of money in lost opportunities and productivity. It was named 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year and was a London Times bestseller. It demonstrates how gender discrimination contributes to an unsatisfied workforce and population and causes avoidable illnesses and deaths among women.

All the imagined scenarios we create for our future selves based on our current experiences. “They are all scarred by a female-shaped ‘absent presence,'” writes Criado Perez, citing multiple studies. “This is the information gap between the sexes.” This has real-world implications, as studies typically only include male workers (such as miners and construction workers) and ignore female workers (such as those working in nail salons) when calculating drug dosages and treatments. Female drivers are more likely to sustain serious injuries in car accidents since the safety features are tailored to the proportions of a man. The same holds true for PPE, such as bulletproof vests, which frequently do not fit female police officers and thus leave them defenseless while on duty.

The breadwinner man in his automobile even dominates the transportation infrastructure. Women, who are traditionally the primary caregivers for children, the elderly, and the grocery store, are forced to rely on public transportation and walking, both of which can be time-consuming and wasteful. The Swedish city of Karlskoga implemented a new procedure for clearing snow, and it proved successful. The city council has made the decision to clear snow from sidewalks before they tackle the roads. During the colder months, pedestrians are three times more likely to experience injuries, most commonly from falls. The total cost of these mishaps during a single winter season was estimated to be around $4 million.

According to Criado Perez, the masculine default is never chosen. If you work in a workplace where men and women dress differently, yet you see that your female coworker is wearing a blanket to keep warm, you can blame the data gender gap.

Best Biography: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Best Origin Story: Trillions

According to Robin Wigglesworth, editor of the Financial Times’ Alphaville, a news and commentary service for financial professionals, “over the past decade, 80 cents of every dollar that has gone into the U.S. investment industry has ended up at Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock.” In this fascinating book, Wigglesworth traces the history of index funds from their inception to the present day and considers the implications of their widespread use.

Wigglesworth begins by introducing a cast of 32 personalities, only two of whom are women: Jeanne Sinquefield, a derivatives designer, and Pattie Dunn, a former CEO of Barclays Global Investors. Also important:

• “Early-twentieth-century French mathematician Louis Bachelier, whose work on the ‘random walk’ of stocks would make him the intellectual godfather of passive investing”
• Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, who won a 10-year-old bet with Ted Seides of Protege Partners in 2017 that the returns of index funds would outstrip those of a basket of hedge funds
• Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, often called “Saint Jack” because his company offered index funds to the public en masse. At the end of his life, Bogle questioned the value of index funds but also defended them. “It’s hard to know how big we can get, and the consequences…,” he said. “But to solve this, we should not destroy the greatest invention in the history of finance.”

Best for Decision-Making Skills: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman has a background in psychology. Although he and his colleague Amos Tversky investigated heuristics in judgment and decision making together, Kahneman is the one who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory. According to prospect theory, investors place more value on perceived profits than perceived losses.

According to his findings, women are better investors than males because they are more likely to ride out market downturns instead of selling while prices are low. From the instantaneous (when to get up, what to eat for breakfast, what to dress) to the more deliberate (who to marry, what career to pursue, and where to live), Kahneman estimates the typical individual makes 35,000 decisions per day.

This data-heavy book is also filled with anecdotes from Kahneman’s life of research and experiences, making it both thoughtful and cerebral. Kahneman and Tversky’s close friendship was the subject of Michael Lewis’ 2016 book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.

Best Read on Scoundrels and Saviors: The Predators’ Ball

Younger readers may only be familiar with Michael Milken in these contexts: as a supporter of prostate cancer research and the creator of the Milken Institute, a think tank that promotes market-based concepts and innovations in finance and beyond. Things changed drastically for Milken after the release of New Yorker journalist Connie Bruck’s riveting book. He had to defend himself against federal charges of securities and tax fraud. During the peak of junk bonds’ popularity and the leveraged buyout boom, he had underwritten some of the most prominent corporate raiders, including Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn.

Milken was so worried about Bruck’s reporting that he even offered to pay for the book’s print run if she would agree to not publish it. He had good reason to be alarmed.

The book details how Milken worked 18-hour days from his Southern California office to build the junk bond market and encourage the corporate raider culture, as well as his subsequent collapse and plea bargain in 1990. There’s Milken, of course, but there’s also Leon Black of Apollo Management, Henry Kravis of KKR & Co., Laurence Tisch of Loews Corp., stock trader Ivan Boesky, and Rudy Giuliani, who was the zealous U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time. In 2020, President Donald Trump fully pardoned Milken.

In The Predators’ Ball, we have a period recreation of the time when “greed is good.”