I love books about investing that aren't about investing. Or, to put it more coherently, I like books that are highly applicable to business & finance without necessarily being explicitly about same.

Currently, for example, I'm finishing up Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and enjoying it oodles. Sure, it's partly because I'm as a much of an amateur traffic sociologist as the next resident of freeway-blighted SoCal, but also because there is much in the dynamics of traffic -- rampant self-interest operating in a forced juxtaposition of herd and individual behavior -- that has useful parallels in capital markets.

Another non-investing investing book favorite of mine is Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism. A thin but thoughtful read, in it the famous philosopher tears apart the whole idea of prediction. Wonderfully clear and logical writing, and directly applicable to current conversations about the predictability of market failures, the future of regulation, etc. Great stuff

Feel free to add other book suggestions for recent (or not-so-recent) non-investing investing books.

Is Amazon's Kindle a e-book reader turning into the iPod of books? It got generally positive reviews at launch, but word of mouth is driving it faster now, with people pushing it on each other increasingly eagerly. 

Further confirmation of the Kindle phenomenon comes this morning in a report from analyst Mark Mahaney at Citi. He calls Kindle sales "much stronger" than expected, and goes on to double (!) his forecast for first year product sales, taking his guesstimate to 380,000 units -- or about the same number of iPods as Apple sold in its launch year.

Citi's Mahaney sees Kindle revenues hitting $1b by 2010, or roughly 4% of Amazon's total revenues. That would be darn impressive, if the company can pull it off. Check the following figure for more.

The controversial financial research finding of the week (or maybe year) goes to a new-ish paper (Red and Blue Investing: Values and Finance) looking at the relationship between mutual fund and hedge fund manager performance, and political contributions. The paper, by Harrison Hong and Leonard Kostovetsky, is more generally an attempt to untangle the relationship between U.S. manager postures toward socially responsible investing (SRI) and their party affiliation.

The most controversial finding, however, comes with respect to investing outperformance depending on political persuasion. The authors discover that the coefficient for Democratic fund managers is 0.061% compared to the 0.092% for Republicans, which amounts to a 36 basis points a year difference.

Okay, okay, that's admittedly not a huge performance difference -- in most real-world comparison it would get eaten up by cost differences -- but it's still sure to irritate some people.

Some quick links to things people have sent me that others may find interesting:

• Why are people from Vermont so much skeptical than the the rest of the U.S. about Michael Phelp's medal haul? (ESPN)
• Another affordable luxury victim: DISH Networks sees subscribers tumble (ShellyPalmer)
• Financal crises doomed to recur unless we scatter the investing herds (Reuters)
• Prices of $35,000 and more being quoted by Vancouver-ites looking to rent homes around 2010 Olympics. Will it be that market's top? (Globe & Mail)

I use the following quote too often in presentations, so I might as well come clean and put it up here. It's from physicist Niels Bohr:

Tomorrow is going to be wonderful, because tonight I do not understand anything.

Talk about slamming the barn door after the cows have all gone, check the eye-popping percentage of U.S. loan officers in the following Federal Reserve chart saying that their firm is tightening credit for home loans. We are at levels of credit restrictiveness that we haven't seen in the modern history of the Fed loan officer survey.

So, where were all these belated barn door-slammers four years ago?

[via Federal Reserve]