HN Books @HNBooksMonth

This is where I started: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Asset-Allocator-Portfolio...

It should resonate with the HN crowd as it starts from the basics and builds up a strategy. Very understandable. It then uses that to help you build an overall investment strategy.

Bernstein is in line with the Boglehead investing theory. Own the market, don't try and beat it.

It has served me very well.

I read an amazing book about portfolio allocation a few years back and reallocated my holdings. The thing that impressed me was a historical analysis which showed that, as long as you split your fixed income and equities, you would do quite well. The interesting thing was that you could split them sub-optimially and the whole thing would do well. Getting the proportion exactly right would get you a slightly better return, but much less than I expected.

When the market is charging ahead, it might seem that holding bonds/fixed income might be a waste, but it's really just a form of insurance. Another interesting thing I learned was that holding inversely correlated things led to higher returns and less volatility. So an all-equity portfolio would generally have a slightly smaller return than one with even 5 or 10% fixed income.

Anyways, the book was by a guy named William Bernstein, and his (very dated looking) site is at http://www.efficientfrontier.com/. His book is called the Intelligent Asset Allocator. The first 2 chapters are on the author's site. The book can be ordered from Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0071362363/ref=cm_cr_...

Great list. Another book I've found helpful is "The Intelligent Asset Allocator" [0]. The concepts on modern portfolio theory it discusses seem to jive with Matt's article. Basically, when investing for the long term, focus more on balancing the asset classes in accordance with your risk profile than picking specific investments within an asset class. It was a very readable book for someone like me without investing experience but didn't feel like it oversimplified things.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Asset-Allocator-Portfo...

Do some reading: Intelligent Asset Allocator by William Bernstein[1]

The book is actually a quick read even if you're not a math whiz (which I'll assume you are). It goes through a review of how to allocate your money across a number of investments and explain why it makes sense not only from a theoretical perspective but also based on historical returns in the stock market.

You can also pick up other books by William Bernstein that cover the same thing in different degrees of detail.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Asset-Allocator-Portfo...