The best books, journalists, and academics for keeping up with bubbles and trading

The feedback loop between financial markets and bubbles is fiendishly difficult to unravel, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the bookshelf of financial bubble literature gets heavier every year. Here are a few of the most influential and interesting ones:

• Irrational Exuberance is Yale professor Robert Shiller’s seminal book on financial bubbles. The Nobel prize winner’s other books include Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.
• Richard Thaler is a titan of behavioral economics. Consider the Nobel prize winner’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, and Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.
• John Coates, a Wall Street trader turned neuroscientist, considers the molecule of “irrational exuberance” in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.
• Professors Willian Quinn and John Turner take a tour through centuries of panics in Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles.

If you want to nerd out on market structure—the plumbing that underpins financial markets around the world—you’ll want to follow these journalists:

• John McCrank covers US exchanges for Reuters.
• Alexander Osipovich reports on US exchanges for the Wall Street Journal.
• Kate Rooney covers fintech and markets for CNBC.
• Philip Stafford writes about European and global market structure with the Financial Times.
• Larry Tabb is head of market structure research at Bloomberg Intelligence

Here are some writers who report on retail brokerages, like Robinhood and Charles Schwab, for everyday investors:

• Michael Wursthorn writes for the Wall Street Journal. Check out his story about whether Robinhood’s design (paywall) makes trading too easy.
• Nathaniel Popper reports on finance and technology at the New York Times. Here is his report on young traders dabbling on Robinhood.
• Tara Siegel Bernard covers personal finance at the New York Times. Here she dives into so-called commission-free trading.

Academics constantly pore over reams of data, researching how technology, rules, and regulations are changing the world’s securities markets.  These are some prominent professors whose research to look out for:

• James Angel, Georgetown
• Albert Menkveld, VU University
• Maureen O’Hara, Cornell University
• Joshua White, Vanderbilt University