It is that time of the year when giving or receiving a book might be on the agenda. Here are some ideas for books that may interest you, or others. Last year’s offerings can be found by clicking here.

Never Bullshit the Client - Richard Ennis

“This was the beginning of a new era. Investment managers could observe the level of their portfolios’ market-relative risk and degree of diversification. As a result, they began to understand what - apart from their sheer brilliance - might account for the returns earned by their portfolios.” You get the feeling that Richard Ennis has seen a lot of bullshit and here he distils his wisdom gathered from working in the investment consulting business.

The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel

“Realising the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked upon highly by the financial forecasting community”. Morgan Housel takes us through many of the investing mistakes that people make and offers some basic antidotes to those which are so dull very few are likely to follow them. In essence, you have a greater chance of getting wealthy slowly than you do of getting rich quickly, but that isn’t much fun.

Patient Capital - Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner

“The IRR … measures how quickly a manager grows investors’ money … an investment that turns one penny into two in a day would generate an IRR roughly equal to 8 with 109 zeroes afterward”. This book considers what is going well and what is going less well when (potentially) long-term investors meet investment managers and the two get busy in private markets. It also delivers some best practice points, which it would be popular to ignore.

Non-Consensus Investing - Rupal Bhansali

“One leading indicator of excess is when a lot of new products or funds are being launched in a given category or sector. They are usually asset-gathering strategies pandering to investor appetite, instead of investment strategies with genuine return potential”. Does this sound familiar? If you think that investment management is about risk management and investing and speculating are not the same thing, then this could be the book for you.

The Art of Statistics - David Spiegelhalter

Do you suffer from apophenia? David Spiegelhalter aims to help, not least by introducing us to the website of Tyler Vigen, by delving into the world of statistics. This is something he knows a lot about as he currently holds the position as Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and, at the moment, he pops up in the news every now and again. If you only read the pages on conditional probability then it would be worth it,