Resource



We appreciate your enthusiasm about investing and strongly recommend interested incoming students to get a head start on the self-learning. Recruiting for investment management is not a level playing field: each of you are coming from different backgrounds and you will be competing with students from other MBA programs who have had much more relevant pre-MBA experience. The only effective way to differentiate yourself is to prove intrinsically that you have the skills to do the job. It takes a combination of passion and hard work to learn as much as you can and to come up with compelling investment ideas to generate job leads and wow your interviewers.

Book Recommendations

Value Investing:

  • Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
  • "The Intelligent Investor", Benjamin Graham
  • "The Most Important Thing", Howard Marks
  • "Margin of Safety", Seth Klarman
  • "The Outsiders", William Thorndike
  • "Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle", Edward Chancellor

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Leveraged / Distressed Credit:

  • "Distressed Debt Analysis: Strategies for Speculative Investors", Stephen Moyer
  • "A Pragmatist's Guide to Leveraged Finance: Credit Analysis for Bonds and Bank Debt", Robert Kricheff
  • "Standard & Poor's Fundamentals of Corporate Credit Analysis", Blaise Ganguin and John Bilardello

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Special Situation:

  • "You Can Be a Stock Market Genius", Joel Greenblatt

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GARP (Growth At a Reasonable Price):

  • "One Up on Wall Street", Peter Lynch

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Growth:

  • "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits", Philip Fisher

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Business Strategy:

  • "Competition Demystified", Bruce Greenwald
  • "Understanding Michael Porter", Joan Magretta

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Accounting/Finance:

  • "Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies", McKinsey & Co.
  • "The Little Book of Valuation", Aswath Damodaran
  • "Accounting for M&A, Credit, and Equity Analysts", James Morris
  • "Financial Shenanigans", Howard Schilit
  • "The Investment Checklist", Michael Shearn
  • "Quality of Earnings", Thornton O'Glove

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Thinking and Networking:

  • "Influence", Robert Cialdini
  • "How to Win Friends and Influence People", Dale Carnegie
  • "Thinking Fast and Slow", Daniel Kahneman
  • "Fooled By Randomness", Nassim Taleb
  • "The Black Swan", Nassim Taleb
  • "Antifragile", Nassim Taleb

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Industry Specific:

  • "House of Morgan", Ron Chernow (JP Morgan)
  • "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World", William Cohan (Goldman Sachs)
  • "Shoe Dog", Phil Knight (Nike)
  • "Sam Walton: Made in America", Sam Walton (Walmart)
  • "The Prize" – Daniel Yergin (oil and gas)
  • "Cable Cowboy", Mark Robichaux (Cable / John Malone)
  • "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon", Brad Stone (Amazon)
  • "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future", Ashlee Vance (Tesla / Elon Musk)

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Areas of High Finance

Investment Banking:

  • "Monkey Business", John Rolfe and Peter Troob

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Private Equity:

  • "Barbarians at the Gate - The Fall of RJR Nabisco", Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
  • "King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzmann and Blackstone", David Carey and John Morris
  • "King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist", Mark Stevens
  • "The Predators' Ball : The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of Junk Bond Raiders", Connie Bruck

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Hedge Fund:

  • "Money Masters of Our Time", John Train
  • "More Money Than God", Sebastian Mallaby
  • "When Genius Failed", Roger Lowenstein
  • "Fooling Some of the People All the Time, A Long Short Story", David Einhorn
  • "Confidence Game: How Hedge Fund Manager Bill Ackman Called Wall Street's Bluff", Christine Richard
  • "The Greatest Trade Ever", Greg Zuckerman
  • "The Big Short", Michael Lewis

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Sell-side Research:

  • "Confession of a Wall Street Analyst", Daniel Reingold
  • "Exile on Wall Street", Mike Mayo

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Sales and Trading:

  • "Liar's Poker", Michael Lewis
  • "The Buy Side", Turney Duff