Happy New Year, investors. US markets are back open this morning, and today we have a shortened edition covering the best books I read in the last year and why they matter for 2026.

We’ll get back to our regular news programming on Monday.

I read 40 books over the last year spanning markets, business and technology.

The list below ranges from biography and history to science fiction. I believe each of them provide unique insights for investors to start the new year a little smarter. 

This is the definitive account of how central bankers’ decisions after World War 1 set the stage for the Great Depression. 

It’s a masterclass in how monetary policy errors compound, and how a lack of foresight among the early central bankers created repercussions that lasted decades. 

A sweeping history of interest rates across centuries, covering the earliest market economies through the zero-rate policies of the 21st century. 

As rates look set to fall in 2026, this book provides the historical context for how asset prices, housing, and inequality can shift with the price of time. 

Lords of Finance provides an event-driven historical account of the run-up to 1929, but Sorkin’s book is a character-driven story that reads like a novel. 

It unpacks the people and their fears and follies, revealing how everyday decisions by leading bankers and financiers led to the collapse. 

It’s an excellent companion to read with the above two choices, as it provides a more human texture and voice to the events of the time.

SoftBank to this day remains one of the biggest spenders of the AI boom, and this biography of its risk-obsessed founder is a fantastic analysis of how he thinks and why he bets so big on innovation.

It’s also a cautionary tale of leverage, and details the thin line between visionary investing and catastrophic overconfidence.

While not explicitly a financial book, Anxious Generation for me helped me understand the dark side of social media — the most popular technology in the world and the brainchild of many of the Magnificent 7.

Smartphones and social apps are reshaping the brains — and so behavior — of children, professionals, consumers, voters and investors, all of which has downstream effects on productivity and politics. 

First released in 1950, this collection of classic science fiction stories introduced the “Three Laws of Robotics” that continue to influence policy and programming in AI in the present. 

The stories explore the ethical and logical consequences of AI — particularly relevant as AI continues to move from abstraction to infrastructure. 

Asimov’s rules on AI remains sharply relevant 75 years later, and read as if they could have been written today.   

🗓 January 2, 1918: This marked the New York Stock Exchange’s lowest trading volume day of the 20th century. The S&P 500 traded around 7.40 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovered at 54.50.

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📰 I’m Phil Rosen, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Opening Bell Daily. I’ve published books, lived on three continents, and won awards for my journalism, which has appeared in Business Insider, Fortune, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg and Inc. Magazine.

I write our flagship newsletter and host our show, Full Signal, to prepare you for each trading day — unpacking markets, economic data and Wall Street with analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Feedback? Reply to this email, ping me on X @philrosenn, or write me directly at [email protected].