A Random Walk Down Wall Street
The academic case for market efficiency: stock prices reflect all available information, and consistent outperformance through stock-picking is essentially impossible. Malkiel surveys bubbles, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and modern portfolio theory with the confidence of a man who has data on his side. Required reading in every MBA program, and the intellectual basis for index investing.
Malkiel has been adding chapters for fifty years, and the book now reads like a museum of dismissed fads with one exhibit per edition: chartism, tulips, dot-coms, crypto. The advice (buy index funds) takes a paragraph; the rest is a victory lap. And efficient markets emerged from 2008 looking less like a law of nature than the book's confidence suggests.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
