Best Reads of 2020

2020 was a weird year, to put it mildly. Life changed for all of us, in a lot of ways. And for most, it meant that things got a lot more difficult. Personally, I also had the brilliant idea to change jobs from an asset owning giant to a boutique alternatives platform at the peak of the crisis, no less. What can I say; I'm a glutton for punishment.

The first few months of the pandemic lockdown seemed like an eternity, at least to me. The gardening leave I had originally planned - the first meaningful time off in nearly twenty years - was less than restive. While certainly a disappointment, at the time we thought it would be a temporary thing. And here we are at the end of the year still quarantining like champs. How a year can both drag on interminably and simultaneously fly by in a flash is a seemingly impossible paradox, yet 2020 somehow managed to pull it off.

It was a harder battle this year trying to make time for reading. Frankly, financial and business material just became a bit of a slog (with some exceptions). Something about millions of people losing their jobs - and worse - made it seem a little, well, perhaps pedantic. Fiction, history, and autobiographies occupied a greater percentage of mind share this year, as did stories that had a human interest element to them.

I didn't quite hit the one book per week reading total that I shoot for again, as this year seemed to present me with one thing after another that just took priority over leisure time. (And to be fair, a good deal of my reading hours were spent writing my first book, so there's that! Better than Alpha ships March 16, 2021 and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.)

Still, I thought I would share some of my most memorable, enjoyable, or thought provoking reads of 2020, distilled from the Top 20 above.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism - This book by Joel Kotkin paints a distressing picture of the decline of both competitive capital markets and a truly representative democracy in favor of a socio-economic structure that has more in common with Medieval feudalism. The rising concentration of power in few, large economic engines that have special status with government regulators, technocrats, media, educators and other policy setters, leaving consumers and employees in a disadvantaged position, is borne out by data on the rising concentration of wealth. And this is more similar to the alignment of crown and church with one set of rules versus yeomans and serfs on the other end found in feudalistic economies than it is with democratic capitalism. And it appears many of our policy responses are pushing us in the wrong direction.

(Honorable mention, The Capitalist Manifesto, written in 1958 by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler predicted this exact scenario if government attempts to manage capitalism followed the path of massive regulatory burdens and corporate advantages to preferred parties which effectively limited participation and distribution of economics resulting from human input into the production function. They also gave some recommendations for how to move back in the other direction.)

The Rise of Carry - Another tale of a new financial order around decaying growth and wealth disparity (what can I say, I'm a glutton for punishment), this book by a trio of authors ties a great deal of today's capital markets activity and in truth economic activity broadly to the carry trade - or using the proceeds from shorting a low yielding asset to buy a higher yielding one. The three authors - all experienced traders and investors themselves - pull back the veil to reveal that this pernicious strategy is not merely evident across financial markets, but intrinsically linked to the US dollar's status as global reserve currency, making the United States government effectively the world's biggest carry trader. Simply put, carry trading is now the primary determinant of the highly-leveraged global business cycle. And we should expect more steady economic expansions punctuated by increasingly severe and volatile crises going forward.

Never Bullshit the Client - Richard Ennis is one of the pioneers of institutional investment consulting, virtually creating the field at A.G. Becker & Co. in the seventies before founding EnnisKnupp, the first consultancy to be recognized as a professional services firm, in 1981. Ennis had the unusual combination of an academic's intellectual horsepower and research skills - he was a prolific author of financial journal contributions - with the no-nonsense advice of a straight talking practitioner. His engrossing - and aptly titled - memoir gives readers the story of how Ennis's upbringing and early professional experiences lead him to pursue a life of injecting honesty, clarity, and service into an industry often dominated by prevarication, opacity, and greed. His was a career worth emulating.

How I Invest My Money - Joshua Brown and Brian Portnoy give readers 25 vignettes from professional money managers and advisors on how they invest. To be clear, this isn't a how- to manual; these are personal stories of these investors' relationships with money which includes how their lives have framed their individual approaches to saving, investing, and spending. It's more about the why's than the how's, but the why's matter more and probably don't get enough of our attention. (There's that human element of investing again...) This book is a quick, engaging read, and after putting it down, I spent some time contemplating my wealth using elements of the various contributors' frameworks. It definitely helped me find clarity on some priorities, as I think it would for readers of any sophistication level.

Born on a Blue Day - One of the most astonishing minds on planet earth, Daniel Tammet, shared his amazing story with us in his memoir. A few of the incredible feats of this autistic savant include holding the world record for reciting pi from memory - out to 22,514 digits - and learning a language - Icelandic, the tenth which he can speak conversationally - in just one week. Tammet has synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon whereby stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway is linked to involuntary activity in other typically unrelated sensory or cognitive pathways, like seeing music or numbers as various colors. It is thought this helps strengthen recall, providing savants with their remarkable memory skills. Unlike many who cannot explain their abilities due to verbal deficiencies, Tammet's prose provides exceptionally clear insight into how his extraordinary (yes, that's a lot of superlatives) mind works. Indeed, he may be the Rosetta stone for autism spectrum disorders.

Please leave comments below on what were the most memorable books you read in 2020, and I'll see you in 2021, maybe in the real world even!

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of any institution.