Useful for a last-minute gift for yourself or your loved ones.

Merry Christmas!

1. Lords of Finance – Liaquat Ahamed

Liaquat Ahamed won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2009 for it but it’s about the Great Depression and the Crash of 1929.

2. One Up On Wall Street – Peter Lynch

How to spot the next ten-bagger.

3. Inside the House of Money – Steven Drobny

Macro-thinking. Interviews with top Hedge Fund Managers.

4. The Warren Buffet Way – Hagstrom, Fisher, Miller

Essentials of Value investing according to Buffett, with nods to Fisher & Graham.

5. The Greatest Trade Ever – Gregory Zuckerman

How John Paulson cemented his place as one of the greatest traders/hedge fund managers ever.

6. Trend Following – Michael Covel

All types of Trend-following information, including from the cryptic but highly successful Ed Seykota.

7. Way of the Turtle – Curtis Faith

Are traders born or bred? This question led to an experiment which is documented here. Hugely interesting.

8. Trade your way to financial freedom – Van Tharp

Describes criteria for a complete trading plan. Also speaks about Psychology.

9. Come into my trading room – Dr. Alexander Elder

Complete trading plan, with examples.

10. Trading for a living – Alexander Elder

11. Reminiscences of a stock operator – Edwin Lefèvre

Life of the legendary Jesse Livermore.

12. How I made $2,000,000 in the stock market – Nicolas Darvas

How Darvas, a dancer, approached the stock market from scratch and evolved a mix of fundamental and technical perspectives. Highly entertaining and educational.

13. Quantitative Trading – Ernie Chan

14. Generate Thousands in Cash on your Stocks Before Buying or Selling Them – Samir Elias

15. The Lazy Investor – Derek Foster

For the long, value and dividend approach with compounding. For investors, not traders.

16. An American Hedge-Fund – Timothy Sykes

How Tim made a fortune out of his bar mitzvah money, $12,500 and then proceeded to lose all of it. More importantly, how Tim dusted himself up again to do it one more time starting with the exact same amount of money. This time, however, he’s doing it in the open, documenting winning and losing trades through Covestor. He rules the penny stocks space. Follow him on his blog, on Covestor, on Twitter, Facebook, Livestream, etc… – he’s everywhere.

17. Investing The Templeton Way – Lauren Templeton, Scott Phillips

18. Market Wizards – Jack Schwager

19. Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets – John Murphy

20. Japanese Candlestick Charting Patterns – Steve Nison

This shows how essential real-time has become on the Web.

For me it’s a big win for the underlying open source technology framework for Rapid Web Development, Ruby on Rails, which I have been recommending to enterprises since about 4 years ago.

Where are you on the Technology Adoption Lifecycle below regarding Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Have you innovated? Are you an early adopter because you understand the business implications, or will you be at the other end of the spectrum, a laggard?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

The news is, however, huge for Twitter, which is said by Bloomberg to be profitable now.

Twitter has become a platform essential to the Web in Marketing/Advertising, Customer Care (though less as people understand this less) but also in Finance. Witness Howard Linzon’s StockTwits, itself leveraged by NASDAQ’s Portfolio Manager application for the iPhone.

It’s huge news because the real-time web can be input signals into high-frequency trading strategies.

If Twitter does an IPO, I won’t miss it.