For many of us, we had no reason or interest in trying to understand the stock market or hedge funds, and our curiosity about those things was satisfied by the movies The Big Short or The Wolf of Wall Street. Until a few days ago, of course, when GameStop and short selling stormed into the news cycle. Here are a few books that can help you understand how these financial systems work and why everything has seemed so dramatic this week. 

Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar

If you enjoy documentaries that make you angry or fiction with villains that you love to hate, this book is for you. It traces the rise and fall of stock trader Steven Cohen and his hedge fund, SAC Capital, as well as the FBI and SEC investigations that led to several convictions for insider trading (though not of Cohen himself). Kolhatkar describes the nuts and bolts of hedge funds in a way accessible to the non-insider. 

 

 

 

Short Selling: Finding Uncommon Short Ideas by Amit Kumar

 This book is a practical guide to the risky practice of betting against stocks. It shares Kumar's short-selling framework, developed over decades and built on themes common to falling stocks and the market's endemic strengths and cycles. 

 

 

 

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

 A chronicle of the evolution of hedge funds from their origins in the 1960s to their role in the 2008 economic crisis, discussing the contributions of key figures while offering insight into how they have weathered recent financial setbacks and are defining future trends.

 

 

 

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

With his characteristic insight and compelling narrative style, Lewis turns to the housing bubble and the 2008 crash of the U.S. stock market. He finds both villains and heroes in a world of risky derivatives, duped stockholders, and the ground-level traders who saw it all coming. 

 

 

 

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

The story of a trading prodigy who amassed millions playing the markets like a video game from his working-class West London childhood home until he unwittingly started The Flash Crash and the FBI showed up at his door.

 

 

 

Circle of Friends: The Massive Federal Crackdown on Insider Trading And Why the Markets Always Work Against the Little Guy by Charles Gasparino

Rather than focusing on the traders per se, this book instead shines light on government investigators and prosecutors as they aggressively pursue one of the  broadest federal crackdowns on insider-trading in the nation's history.

 

 

 

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

A veteran Wall Street Journal investigative reporter tells the gripping story of how a world-class mathematician and former code breaker mastered the market. Simons pioneered a data-driven, algorithmic approach that's sweeping the world.

 

 

 

The Wisdom of Finance : Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir A. Desai

A Harvard Business School professor draws upon literature, film, philosophy, and history to argue that, at the core of finance and financial practices, there is a place for principles, ethics, and humanity.

 

 

 

 

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Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!

Summaries adapted via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.