The Best Investing Books of the 2010s.
The decade's standout titles — written during the longest bull market in history
The 2010s were a strange decade to write an investing book. The bull market that began in March 2009 ran for eleven years, making almost any buy-and-hold strategy look brilliant and any cautionary voice look foolish — until 2020. The books that aged best from this era were the ones that used the good times to teach timeless discipline rather than celebrating the conditions that made it easy. The standout titles of the decade shared a quality: intellectual honesty about what investors could and couldn't control. Several came from writers who had survived the 2008 crisis and spent the 2010s processing its lessons. Others looked further back — at market history spanning centuries — to provide context the boom-times crowd was eager to ignore. Read together, these five books form a cohesive picture of what the 2010s taught us: that long runs of good returns produce overconfidence, that volatility is permanent, and that the investors who do best are the ones who've already decided how they'll behave before the next crisis arrives.
Books were selected based on their publication window (2010–2019), the lasting influence of their central ideas, and whether their core arguments held up through the market volatility of 2020 and beyond. We excluded books that rode the decade's bull market optimism without offering principles durable enough to survive a downturn.
The list, in order
- №1◈ Best overall
The Psychology of Money
by Morgan Housel · 2020
◈Canon★Brian's PickPublished in 2020 but rooted in essays Housel wrote across the 2010s, this book distills the decade's most important behavioral finance insights into a compact, memorable package. Its argument — that financial outcomes are driven more by behavior than by knowledge — is the decade's defining investing idea, and it's told through stories rather than formulas, making it the most readable book on this list.
- №2◈ Best for growth stock research
100 baggers
by Christopher W Mayer
◈CanonChristopher Mayer's 2015 deep-dive into stocks that returned 100x or more is a manual for long-horizon thinking. By studying what 100-baggers had in common — high returns on invested capital, owner-operators, long runways — Mayer gave readers a framework for identifying exceptional businesses before they become household names. The book's central message ('buy right and sit tight') cuts against every trading instinct the bull market encouraged.
- ◈ Best for building emotional resilience
Unshakeable
by Tony Robbins
◈CanonTony Robbins distilled hundreds of hours of conversations with the world's top financial minds into a framework for surviving volatility without panic-selling. While broader in scope than a pure investing manual, Unshakeable delivers its core message — that corrections and bear markets are temporary and that long-term investors should welcome rather than fear them — in language accessible to investors at any experience level.
Questions about this list
Why does The Psychology of Money appear on a 2010s list if it was published in 2020?
Morgan Housel developed the ideas in this book through blog posts and essays written throughout the 2010s on the Collaborative Fund and Motley Fool blogs. The book is a synthesis of that decade's thinking, even if the final published form arrived in 2020. Its intellectual roots are firmly in the 2010s market environment.
Were there any 2010s investing books that didn't age well?
Yes — books that extrapolated the 2010s bull market forward as a permanent condition, or that claimed low volatility was the new normal, looked prescient until 2020 and then embarrassing afterward. We excluded titles whose core premise depended on the specific conditions of the decade rather than durable principles.
Is 100 Baggers appropriate for beginning investors?
It's better suited to investors who already understand basic valuation concepts and are looking to develop a framework for identifying exceptional long-term compounders. Beginners may want to read The Psychology of Money or Unshakeable first to build behavioral foundations before diving into Mayer's stock-selection methodology.