I almost hesitate to designate Howard Marks’s Mastering the Market Cycle as my Book of the Year, for fear of damning it with faint praise: thoughtful financial advisors will find it the book of the millennium so far. Indeed, I expect it to take its place as a timeless investment classic, on the order of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and Charles Ellis’s Winning the Loser’s Game.

Mr. Marks is a legendary investor, and a writer of occasional letters that are avidly read by top investment professionals worldwide. Yet he writes with a simplicity, a clarity and above all a humility—a profound respect for the unknowable—that set him apart from anyone I know who is writing today from deep and successful investment experience.

His subject here is the inexorability of the great cycle of human nature as it plays out in the capital markets, and how investors trying to determine how much or how little risk to take on might seek to do so based on a sense of where we are in that cycle.

We find ourselves today 10 years into one of the all-time great bull markets in equities, during which they have quadrupled their panic lows of the last cycle. Little wonder, then, that we and our clients struggle incessantly to infer from current economic data where in the cycle we are now. Mr. Marks gently invites us to back away from the data, and observe what we can about the immutable cycle of behavior.

You may find, as I certainly did, that this book has come along just when we needed it most.

• Nearly a decade ago, I discovered the Swedish academic superstar Hans Rosling’s video “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes.” I was delighted by its message of secularly improving world health and wealth, and even more so by the infectious enthusiasm of the man himself.

In early 2016, Rosling was stricken with incurable pancreatic cancer; he canceled his many speaking engagements and other initiatives, and spent the last year of his life writing, with his son and daughter-in-law, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. It is the summation of his life’s work, debunking declinism and extolling the dramatic and accelerating progress of our world.

I can’t praise it enough; it’s a must-read for every advisor and a perceptive holiday gift to your more thoughtful clients. Hans Rosling died in February 2017, but will live forever in Factfulness.

• How could I, of all people, not love Ken Langone? Aside from the facts that he’s much smarter than I am, and much, much wealthier, we have a lot in common: poor kids from nowhere (east of Manhattan); Catholic; fell in love the summer after freshman year in college and married for life; went to Wall Street to seek our fortune. The list goes on.

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