The Macro Thinker

The founding text of the Austrian School. Menger builds economic theory from first principles: subjective value, marginal utility, and the origin of money.

The founding text of modern economics. Smith on the division of labor, the invisible hand, free trade, capital accumulation, and the self-regulating mechanisms of competitive markets.

How financial institutions evolved to serve (and sometimes exploit) the real economy. Essential context for understanding modern markets.

Howard Marks on risk, cycles, and second-level thinking. Essential reading for understanding market psychology and contrarian investing.

The greatest macro trader of his generation never wrote a book. Synthesized from three decades of interviews, conference talks, and Schwager's New Market Wizards: concentration, liquidity, fat pitches, and radical flexibility.

The recurring pattern of technology-driven investment booms and busts: railroads, radio, automobiles, electronics, and the internet. How transformative industries create and destroy fortunes through predictable cycles.

The greatest risk manager in macro trading history. Synthesized from the 1987 "Trader" documentary, Schwager's Market Wizards, and three decades of interviews: defense first, 200-day moving average, tape reading, asymmetric payoffs, and the 1987 crash trade.

Jack Schwager's interviews with the greatest traders of the 20th century. Discretionary and systematic, fundamental and technical — the common threads of risk management, discipline, and edge that separate survivors from blowups.

The book that reshaped economics. Keynes on aggregate demand, liquidity preference, the multiplier, and why markets don't always self-correct.

Hayek's counter to Keynes: how credit expansion distorts the structure of production and inevitably leads to bust. The Austrian business cycle theory.

Soros' theory of reflexivity: feedback loops between market prices and fundamentals that create boom-bust cycles. The philosophical foundation behind the Quantum Fund.

The psychological foundations of market behavior. Prospect theory, loss aversion, anchoring, overconfidence, and the systematic biases that create mispricings.

The monetarist counter-revolution. Friedman's reinterpretation of the Great Depression, the natural rate of unemployment, the permanent income hypothesis, and the case for rules-based monetary policy.

Applied econometrics with a focus on foreign exchange markets. Regression, time series, and the empirical tools for macro-financial research.

The intersection of physical commodity markets and financial derivatives. Supply chains, storage, term structure, and the financialization of commodities.

Bonds, yield curves, duration, convexity, and rate trading. The largest asset class in the world, and the one most finance curricula cover worst.