One Hedge Fund Ace's Essential Investor Reading List

  Bruce Upbin, Forbes Staff
I manage our tech and wealth teams.
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When Steve Kuhn talks people should listen, especially that one time in late 2011 when he said the best trade of 2012 was going to be going long subprime mortgages. Kuhn certainly did, and the head of fixed-income trading at Pine River Capital Management earned the second-best return (32.9%) and fourth-best return (28%) among all large hedge funds in the first ten months of 2012, according to a list recently published by Bloomberg Markets.
 
                
                
Steve Kuhn. Photo: Bloomberg
If you can’t sit down with Kuhn and hear what he has to say, the next best thing is to read what he thinks is worth reading. Kuhn, 43, consumes books voraciously and when he gets hold of one he loves he buys dozens of copies and hands them out to colleagues at Pine River. Here are the works, in no particular order, the Harvard economics grad says have shaped his investing career the most. Pine River was kind enough to share the list with our readers. Tell us what you think or if Kuhn is missing anything. There is one book that Kuhn, a big sci-fi fan, left off: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. He’s psyched that Harrison Ford is attached to upcoming movie of the 1980s classic.
                
                
1. Predictably Irrational: Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
2. Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown
3. The Invisible Hands by Steven Drobny (focus on Chapter 4)
4. The Missing Risk Premium: Why Low Volatility Investing Works by Erik Falkenstein
5. Finding Alpha: The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down by Erik Falkenstein
6. Expected Returns: An Investor’s Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen
7. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
8. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein
9. Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone
10. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff
11.The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t by Nate Silver
12. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
13. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
14. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
15. The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life by Richard H. Thayler
Additional Reading: White Papers and Articles
The 5 Percent Solution by Clifford Asness and Antti Ilmanen
Principles by Ray Dalio
Post Modern Portfolio Theory: Engineering targeted by Ray Dalio (The only online copy of Dalios’ Post Modern Portfolio Theory requires a password.
Buffett’s Alpha by Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller, and Lasse H. Pedersen
Diversification and Beyond: The Comparative Benefits of Multi-Strategy Investing by DE Shaw & Co