Biggs on Finance, Economics, and the Stock Market: Barton's Market Chronicles from the Morgan Stanley Years

Section 6

BOOKS AND LETTERS

Receiving information is the lifeblood of the investment manager, and reading is the most efficient way to imbibe it.

—Barton Biggs, May 5, 1987

Where did Barton Biggs draw his knowledge and inspiration? The same way he imparted it. Through the written word.

Biggs was a voracious, albeit disciplined reader. Before the days of Google searches, video clips, and CNBC, Biggs consumed information through a system of short-term periodicals, analyst reports, investment books, biographies, and historical accounts of world events. By his own reckoning, he read or at least scanned “literally hundreds of investment books, many of them apocalyptic, most of them worthless.”

The best he lists here, along with his personal reading plan. Some are obscure—or at least were until Biggs touted them in some of his periodic book review columns. Of course, there are old classics like Graham and Dodd, as well as some new classics like Schwager's Market Wizards and Bernstein's Capital Ideas. The list alone is like viewing a wireframe model of Biggs's investment mind and intellectual makeup.

Think of it as Biggs's best iTunes playlist. A beginning investor, or even an old hand, will find something of value—even if some titles seem outdated at first glance. Good music, like clear thinking and good writing, endures through the ages.