Oil prices surge to two-week winning streak as Iran supply fears grip markets
This week, I am sharing with you an article by my colleague, Gary Alexander, senior writer at Navellier & Associates. He shares his favorite books in 2025 in time for some Christmas shopping ideas.
This year, I have read and completed 150 carefully selected books, well above my average of 120. I’ve been maintaining this book reading regimen for 40+ years now, as I believe well-researched, well-edited books are the gold standard for information, and their wide-ranging view of the changing world contains valuable investment insights as well. Most of those 150 books were written long before 2025, but I’ve limited this list to new books. I don’t apologize for omitting books on stock trading strategies, which can be a wealth-draining exercise. Listing 10 books on trading, investing, and economics alone could result in a narrow worldview. In that spirit, here are my 10 best books published during the last 10 months – in order of publication. Most are fairly popular – on the New York Times’ best-seller list soon after publication.
Three Books on Careful Stock Selection – Getting to Know Your Company
In general, there is a lot of history on this list, but the first three books focus on wise stock selection.
Book #1: “The Sacred Truths of Investing: Finding Stocks That Will Make You Rich,” by Louis Navellier (published February 11, 2025, 224-pages) is a superb short guide to rational stock selection. (Up front, I must also disclose my long professional affiliation with the author). Already knowing his stock selection criteria, what I liked most about the book are stories of his youth in the Bay Area and his early curiosity about markets and finances, creating a winning formula since his college days in the late 1970s.
Back then, index funds sold well, since few investment advisors could beat the market. Louis thought this was an “un-American” outlook: Who wants to be a guaranteed “C” student? Today, investors must fight the algo-driven trading machines, which can best be defeated by buying and holding great stocks. We all want to excel, and we can with Louie’s clear techniques, spiced with wit. Sacred Truths of Investing should become an essential resource for investors seeking to make better, more informed stock decisions.
Now, we turn to two stock-centered books, profiling the best and perhaps worst among the Mag-7 giants:
Book #2: “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism,” by Sarah Wynn-Williams (March 11, 2025, 385-pages) is a chilling expose of a major Mag-7 company, Facebook (now called Meta). Even though “Careless People” was named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time, The New Yorker, AP, the Globe and Mail, Scientific American and more, its various bombshells led an arbitration board to issue a judgment (on the day after publication) forbidding the author to publicize her book. That led, of course, to far more sales than ever, fulfilling the “Streisand Effect” (bad press increasing interest).
This book covers everything from an early shark attack in her native New Zealand to the author’s seven years inside the highest levels of management at Facebook. It is indeed very controversial, but her views parallel my long antipathy to the practices of this Mag-7 giant. Facebook may have begun by practically linking friends, past and present, but they seem to have expanded their mandate to encourage negative posts (bad news sells) and exacerbating teenage girls’ vulnerabilities, leading to eating disorders, greater depression and even suicide (for verification, see the 5-part 2021 Wall Street Journal series on this). Even though Meta’s stock is rising, becoming “Meta” may have been a meta-mistake, as the Journal reported last week (“Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away from the Meta-verse”), revealing that “Meta has seen operating losses of more than $77 billion since 2020 in its Reality Labs division,” its meta-verse center.
Book #3: “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, by Stephen Witt (April 8, 2025, 272 pages) provides the opposite management template and corporate focus. This is the third year in a row in which I’ve featured a book about Nvidia. This book is the best of the lot, I’d say, and others agree. It won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year and was named one of the Best Books of 2025 by The Economist. One reason I like Nvidia (and not Meta) is the nature of its CEO, founder and leader. Jensen Huang is the real deal, as his years of poverty and struggle built a winning combination of hard work and humility. It took 31 years from Nvidia’s birth at a low-budget chain diner to become the most valuable company on earth. Although I’m not convinced of AI’s value, Huang calls AI “the next industrial revolution.” We’ll see. I see it as simplifying computers for us.
Three Major Biographies Filled with Plenty of Investment Lessons
Two of these doorstop books clock in at over 1,000 pages but these lives are well worth that many pages:
Book #4: “Mark Twain” by Ron Chernow (May 13, 2025, 1,200 pages) is the life story of our wittiest novelist, but to me, this book reads as a series of lost opportunities in the writer’s personal and financial life. Many investors, like us, will grit our teeth and shake our heads as we try to warn Twain: “No, Mark, don’t do that,” as he rushes from one get-rich (get-poor) scheme to another. This put his life and family constantly under the financial gun, losing homes and friends right and left, including the untimely deaths of his infant son, two adult daughters and his beloved wife. I believe Ron Chernow is our greatest big-book biographer, starting in the 1990s with his financial trilogy: “The House of Morgan” (1990), “The Warburgs” (1993) and “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller” (1998). In this century, he is more noted for “Alexander Hamilton” (2005), “Washington: A Life” (2010), “Grant” (2017) and now Twain. I’ve read them all, and this one was often more fun than the tough sledding of some others. It was a deserved #1 NYT best-seller and named a “Best Book of 2025” by TIME, Bloomberg and Kirkus Reviews. I also read most of Twain’s major works in parallel with this biography, and Twain (Sam Clemens) is a delight.
Book #5: “The Greatest American: Benjamin Franklin: The World’s Most Versatile Genius,” by Mark Skousen (May 27, 2025, 320-pages) is shorter and more tightly edited than the two mammoth bios in this section, and, as an economist and investment advisor, Dr. Skousen focuses more on Franklin’s financial and investing principles than some other more verbose biographers I’ve read. When Skousen emailed to ask me who I thought his “Greatest American” in the title would be, I immediately said, “Franklin,” since I know Mark is a direct descendant of Franklin, and he previously wrote The Completed Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin (2006). Mark and I played Ben Franklin (him) and John Adams (me) in the “1776” musical at two investment conferences and again in 2014, as pictured below, along with his wife Jo Ann:
Here are some samples of Skousen’s unique financial angle on Franklin, with chapters on the following:
- Chapter 25: Why Franklin never applied for any patents for his famous inventions.
- Chapter 31: Why Franklin was a free trader, saying, “No nation was ever ruined by trade.”
- Chapter 41: How Franklin changed his mind about slavery and became a devout abolitionist.
- Chapter 57: Why Franklin admired George Washington but not the “obnoxious Mr. Adams” (me!)
- Chapter 69: On Franklin’s preference for private charities rather than state-run social programs.
- Chapter 77: Did Franklin’s hard-to-govern passions turn him into an aging “swinger”?
Book #6: “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,” by Sam Tanenhaus (June 3, 2025, 1,040 pages) is another highly regarded new biography published this year, with at least seven major periodicals putting it on their “best book of the year” list. Long before his death, Buckley chose Tanenhaus to write the uncensored story of his life, and Sam is no “fan boy,” taking tough looks into Buckley’s blind spots, particularly his collusion with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over AIDS coverage, culture wars and the 2003 invasion of Iraq—even as his own media empire was unraveling. I’ve had the honor to introduce Mr. Buckley at New Orleans Investment conferences in spirited debates with John Kenneth Galbraith or George McGovern, and I can only pity his opponents. Buckley lived the life he declared in partial jest at the launch of his National Review 70 years ago: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” That’s hardly realistic, desirable or even possible, but he kept arguing for traditional values in a rapidly changing world.