What I Just Read

History of the cod fishing industry across more than a millennium. The author begins with 10th century Viking and Basque explorers, and takes the reader on a roundabout journey right up to the modern era of global fishing moratoriums. In some ways this book is all over the place, its narrative at times only loosely connected to the cod industry, sometimes not at all. But it's okay: just enjoy the ride and let the author share what he knows. Which turns out to be a pretty interesting history on a subject you'd never expect would be so interesting. Each chapter has a postscript with one or two codfish recipes from a range of cultures and eras, some dating as far back as the 15th century. Once again it's more interesting than you'd expect: the preparation methods, the cuisine styles, even the recipe writing styles of these different eras. It adds an extra something to the book. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if...

A collection of essays, culled from Marathon Asset Management's letters to clients, unified into what turns out to be an uneven book: useful in places, nearly useless in others. However, it offers readers good insights on how to think long term about investing in stocks, and the "capital cycle" (which I'll explain in the next paragraph) is an extraordinarily useful paradigm for investors. So what is the "capital cycle," and how do you invest "through" it? Essentially, all companies have capacity decisions to make, all the time. They have to expand capacity to meet market demand (or contract if there's a decline in demand), and they also have to game theory out what their competitors are thinking about their capacity. Every industry has its own dynamics, of course, but when an industry is in oversupply (in other words it has too much capacity), business quickly becomes terrible, earnings drop, and stock prices go down. And when the reverse is t...