A Fall Bonus: Quality Investment Reading

The Future for Investors by Jeremy Siegel. This is Siegel's follow-up to Stocks for the Long Run. The book describes a phenomenon that I've written about many times on the site: Don't believe the "passive" index managers. Often, the deletions from indices outperform the stocks being added to the different indices. When a stock joins an index, that's usually when it's riding high, showing great returns and growth, and is popular with the media. This is exactly the time one shouldn't be buying. And Siegel has the stats to prove it. Similar to Swensen, there's also a discussion of mutual funds, but this is less interesting to me.

The Search by John Battelle. It's been a while since there's been a good book about Internet technology and business (The Nudist on the Late Shift, by Po Bronson? The Internet Bubble, by Tony Perkins?). Search gets into the history of all the search engines, from Lycos, Excite and Alta Vista, to Yahoo! and Google. He also goes into the history of the different ways these companies developed their business models and how ultimately Bill Gross at Idealab (think "Overture") and the Google guys came up with the right model.

Battelle gets access to all the founders of these companies, gets into the technology without being boring about it, and gets excited enough about his topic that we get a sense that this is only the beginning. The battle for search dominance and its uses in our life is only just beginning. I highly recommend this one for anyone investing in the space.