Best Books on Investing & the Stock Market

Start here

• The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel. Why behaviour, not intelligence, decides investing outcomes.
• One Up on Wall Street — Peter Lynch. Finding great companies in everyday life before analysts do.
• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing — John C. Bogle. The case for low-cost index funds, from the man who invented them.

Value investing

• The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham. Margin of safety and Mr. Market; the foundation text Warren Buffett credits.
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits — Philip Fisher. Judging business quality through the "scuttlebutt" method.
• The Dhandho Investor — Mohnish Pabrai. Low-risk, high-uncertainty bets, explained simply.

India-focused

• Stocks to Riches — Parag Parikh. Behavioural finance written for the Indian retail investor.
• Coffee Can Investing — Saurabh Mukherjea. Buying quality Indian compounders and leaving them alone.
• Bulls, Bears and Other Beasts — Santosh Nair. The story of Dalal Street through its booms and scams.

Trading & market history

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefèvre. A century old and still the best book on speculation and its costs.
• Trading in the Zone — Mark Douglas. The mental discipline side of trading that charts don't teach.

Availability tip: all of these are easy to find at any major bookseller or library. Read one well rather than five quickly.