Book Bits: 16 May 2026

● The New Money Strategy: The Modern Guide to Rational, Long-Term Investing
Brandon van der Kolk
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The New Money Strategy: The Modern Guide to Rational, Long-Term Investing is the ultimate strategy guide to help a new generation of investors harness the power of value investing and the stock market. In this book, Brandon van der Kolk, founder of the popular New Money YouTube channel with more than one million dedicated subscribers, reveals the common mistakes people are making in the markets today and the time-tested strategy to build long term wealth.

● Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work
Alvin E. Roth
Interview with author via Critical Mass podcast
Alvin Roth is a Nobel Prizewinning Economist whose work on designing markets has had real world impacts that may have saved thousands of lives around the world, while arousing strong emotions both for and against the programs he has helped put in place. Clearly not one to shy away from controversy, he represents the best of what The Origins Project is trying to promote: applying science and reason to public policy. In short, connecting science and culture! Roth’s new book, which is fantastic, and comes out the same day this podcast is released deals with issues that often raise the public’s ire, from legalizing prostitution, to assisted suicide, and finally to a rational market for kidney transplants.

● Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump
Arthur Herman
Review via The Wall Street Journal
This year is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States. Most historians are concentrating on the birth itself, when 13 disparate colonies along the east coast of North America declared their intention to separate from Great Britain. That, to be sure, is quite a story, one without previous precedent. So is the story of the Constitutional Convention a few years later, which produced what is now the world’s oldest constitution of a complex sovereign state, amended only 27 times.
In “Founder’s Fire” Arthur Herman—whose books of popular history include “How the Scots Invented the Modern World” (2001)—gives these stories their due. But Mr. Herman sees a bigger picture here. He argues, in this entertaining and enlightening book, that the spirit—the fire—that drove the Founding Fathers to risk everything to establish something very new has animated this country ever since.

● The Art and Business of Professional Trading
Ryan Wright
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
The library of trading literature falls into three largely useless categories. Pop-psychology books focus on mindset and discipline, but psychology is downstream of process. If you lack edge, no amount of mental work saves you. Paint-by-numbers manuals promise certainty through precise setups and mechanical rules, but in an adversarial, reflexive market, widely-known patterns become traps, and the playbook becomes a liability. Academic tomes provide mathematical rigor disconnected from the reality of execution under uncertainty. The Art and Business of Professional Trading occupies the void between them. It is what has been missing for the ambitious trader ready to move beyond hobbyist speculation and think with the rigor of an institutional desk.

● Legacy on the Line: Overcome Blind Spots to Grow and Transfer Your Wealth
Andrea Baumann Lustig
Summary via publisher (Wiley)
In Legacy on the Line: Overcome Blind Spots to Grow and Transfer Your Wealth, sixth-generation wealth adviser and Managing Partner of Fischer Stralem Advisors, Andrea Baumann Lustig shares 30 years of insights working with families to help build and transfer wealth. With the largest wealth transfer in history—$124 trillion—underway, many families risk losing their legacy not through lack of resources, but through unexamined beliefs that quietly undermine their financial future. This book reveals 10 common blind spots that sabotage legacy planning—convictions so deeply held they go unchallenged, often leading to missed opportunities, increased risk, and unnecessary costs.

Please note that the links to books above are affiliate links with Amazon.com and James Picerno (a.k.a. The Capital Spectator) earns money if you buy one of the titles listed. Also note that you will not pay extra for a book even though it generates revenue for The Capital Spectator. By purchasing books through this site, you provide support for The Capital Spectator’s free content. Thank you!