Category Report
Which books are shaping investor thinking this year, as mentioned across leading finance and investing podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen #6, rising 44 places.
Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated by David F. Swensen was the top newcomer at #2. In total 509 books had their debut mentions.
Masters in Business drove the most book chatter, with 29% of this years book mentions.
Across 2025, conversation around books clustered tightly around durable advantage, capital allocation, and the human side of risk. Strategy texts like 7 Powers and The Innovator’s Dilemma are being used as live frameworks for thinking about AI moats, disruption of incumbents, and what actually makes a business durable, not just fast-growing. In parallel, Pioneering Portfolio Management and The Intelligent Investor anchor discussions on endowment-style portfolio construction, margin of safety, and how institutions should navigate alternatives and volatile markets. The strong presence of Morgan Housel’s two books, along with 1929 and Moneyball, highlights a desire to pair quantitative edge with behavioral and historical insight—how people really behave with money, and what happens in bubbles and regime shifts. Biographical interest in Elon Musk rounds this out, signaling ongoing fascination with extreme founder-driven execution as a case study in operating discipline and risk tolerance.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
19
mentions
Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated
David F. Swensen
9
mentions
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
8
mentions
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Morgan Housel
8
mentions
The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life
Morgan Housel
7
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
7
mentions
The Intelligent Investor: The Timeless Guide to Value Investing and Financial Wisdom for a Volatile Market
Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig
7
mentions
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation
Andrew Ross Sorkin
6
mentions
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
6
mentions
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
6
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy to #1.
Significant outlier with 13.3x as many mentions as the average book.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #6.
Up 44 places from #50 last year.
Down from #1 last year
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect to #555.
No mentions after ranking #2 last year.
Wool: A Heart-Pounding Thriller of Survival and Betrayal in a Dystopian World of Darkness to #556.
No mentions after ranking #4 last year.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this year.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the trusted voices in this category.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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