The Bps & Pieces Best of 2018

I promised myself I wouldn’t do a “Best ________ of 2018” post. Heck, I even kind of made fun of them on Twitter:

But here we are. There was just so much damn good stuff I read and listened to this year that I couldn’t help myself. As we close out the year, I am so thankful for all of the people that support this blog. I can only hope that you have found a fraction of the value from some of my posts as I have received from the books, podcasts, blog posts and articles listed below.

(In no particular order)

Books

• Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick
• The Geometry of Wealth: How To Shape A Life Of Money And
• Meaning by Brian Portnoy (My full review here.)
• The Messy Marketplace: Selling Your Business in a World of Imperfect Buyers by Brent Beshore
• The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
• The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike
• Lake Success: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart
• Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson
• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
• Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004 by Maggie Mahar
• The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway

Podcasts

• Cliff Asness – The Past, The Present & Future of Quant (Invest Like the Best)
• What You Learn About Business After 12,000 Deals Reviewed, 1,500 Deep Dives, 125 Site Visits, and 7 Portfolio Companies, w/ Brent Beshore (Invest Like the Best)
• Value is Dead, Long Live Value, with Modest Proposal (Invest Like the Best)
• Data, Decisions, and Basketball with Sam Hinkie (Invest Like the Best)
• Josh Wolfe – Seeing the Lux (Capital Allocators)
• Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators)
• Meb Faber – “Just Survive” (Flirting with Models)
• Leon Cooperman on Finding the Overlooked Investment (Masters in Business)
• Robert Cialdini on the Psychology of Persuasion (Masters in Business)
• David Nadig Discusses the Future of ETFs (Masters in Business)

Blog Posts/Articles/Papers

Quick Reads

• The Quant Frontier (Jamie Catherwood)
• Investing is Hard. Again. Or Still. (James Osborne)
• Investment Cartography (Brendan Mullooly)
• delusions and entitlement (The Reformed Broker)
• The Most Important Asset (Of Dollars and Data)
• Of Pessimism and Pride (Lawrence Hamtil)
• Diversification: Winning the War by Losing Battles (Dan Egan/Betterment)
• Experience is Overrated (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Timing the Market (The Irrelevant Investor)
• What Do Ratios Tell You? (The Irrelevant Investor)
• How to Talk to People About Money (Morgan Housel)
• The Lifecycle of Greed and Fear (Morgan Housel)

Longform

• Liquid Alt Ragnarök? (AQR)
• Alpha within Factors (O’Shaughnessy Asset Management)
• Factors from Scratch (O’Shaughnessy Asset Management)
• How This All Happened (Morgan Housel)
• The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel)
• Factor Fimbulwinter (Newfound Research)
• Fear Not (Bob Seawright)
• Proof Negative (Bob Seawright)
• Private Equity: Overvalued and Overrated? (Daniel Rasmussen)
• Trust the Process (Alpha Architect)
• What People Will Pay For (The Reformed Broker)
• Things Fall Apart (Epsilon Theory)
• Notes From the Road: Roadkill (Epsilon Theory)

The markets kind of sucked this year, but that’s the nature of investing. We have to take the good years with the bad. In spite of the lousy returns, 2018 has been a very special year for me – both personally and professionally. I hope it has been the same for you as well. To all of my readers – even the haters and losers – I wish you a healthy, happy and prosperous 2019!