HN Books @HNBooksMonth

There's the generic analysis that anything in crypto is a scam which is justified by a few hundred years of experience with securities markets, some good books to read are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29803765-supermoney

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39358391-the-money-game

(many of those books are about the psychology of stock market bubbles, which ar a bit less scammy because stocks do have some intrinsic value because the firms involve own assets and produce income)

I can't give you names or dates but I can tell you that "No" and "Nothing more to see here, move on folks" are the best advice I can give you about crypto because it all ends in tears. You will forgo the possibility of selling to a greater fool but eliminate the possibility of being that greater fool which statistically you're more likely to be.

What is great about timeless principles is that they give consistently right answers with the greatest of ease. This goes against the "ahistoric turn" and the general "this time is different" which is said about every bubble but you can be confident that your "predictions" are right.

It's not impossible technically that cryptocurrencies could be regulated like other securities and possibly earn trust except for the fact that blockchains are at best a TRS-80 with a coinslot attached: they just can't compete economically with the likes of the LSE, DTCC/Swift, etc.

There is a tremendous book called "Where are all the customers' yachts?" on how the middlemen used to be the people making all the money: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Customers-Yachts-Street-Investment-...

Very rarely have individual investors from the "masses" done well out of the markets. If they did, they were usually upper-middle-class to start with. Until the 80s and the internet age there were distinct barriers to entry. What did happen was fund investment, at one remove - especially pensions, but also products like life assurance and annuities. The funds are one of the groups deploying machine learning now.

> if we want a stock market that has any resemblance of fairness and democratic influence on the economy?

I'm not sure that's the correct place to deploy the fairness levers against overall economic inequality. We come back to the need for a wealth tax to address dangerously large concentrations of capital destabilising the economy like cargo shifting in a plane.

I don't know if you will lose money, but here is why I suspect you might:

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/...

> then starts talking about market sentiment and concludes by analyzing it's chart

You summarise my experience of the financial industry well. If you haven't already, read "Where Are The Customer's Yachts" by Fred Schwed - very entertaining and funny, in a kind of sad way: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/...

Note that "finance" and "economics" are separate disciplines, roughly corresponding to applied vs theoretical.

The book which changed my thinking the most was "The Other Path" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Path-Economic-Answer-Terroris...

It would be easy to give it the traditional libertarian gloss of "reducing regulation to improve the economy", but it's much more subtle than that. It looks at the costs of being outside the "system", and the benefits of simplifying the system so as to include more people and businesses. Along with land reform to reflect the actual reality of buildings.

Also, short and entertaining, but with lots of insights into principal-agent problems and bubble mentality: "Where Are the Customers' Yachts?" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investme...

A father, who is a banker shows his son "This is our Yacht and those are our brokers''". Son asks "Dad, where are the customers' yachts?".

A book, written in 1930s, based on this quip still remains one of my favourite books about Wall street. Link: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0...

I believe that's not his book. http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Street/dp/0...

⬐ pjc50

Yes, I didn't imply that it was Warren Buffet's book.

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Are-Customers-Yachts-Investment/...