Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond Kindle Edition

Backs up the narratives with financial details. Great history book

All in all this is an engaing book, however the massive massive overestimations of present day value of past investments detract from it. The ones I looked up were at least 4x actuals.

The fact that this book exists at all should earn it five stars.I don’t know of any other book that provides this much useful context around the development of technology since the industrial revolution, together with useful analyses of the financial returns earned by investors.I read the first edition about a year ago, and really enjoyed it.This is the second edition of the book, and it is updated with around 50 pages of additional material on the development of the internet since the first edition was published in 2002.Who is this book for? Students of history of technology and investors of all types should, without a doubt, study it well.I’d like to point out some areas for improvement, perhaps in future editions:- The newspaper clippings included in the book are entertaining and useful. In the first edition, they were large and easy to read. They’ve been reduced in size and the fonts are very small in the second edition; it’s harder to read.- It would have been useful if a technologist co-wrote the book. There are many missing frameworks: Carlotta Perez’s ideas on the boom/bust cycle, Clay Christensen’s ideas on the process of disruptive innovation, and the ideas around aggregation theory by Ben Thompson, to name a few.- An analysis of competitive advantage in the framework of Michael Porter would have been very useful to try to tease out winners and losers over the years- Cloud computing is mentioned only in passing, and there is no mention at all of Amazon Web Services, which is a close analogue of the development of electric utilities by Sam Insull, except for the compute economy- There is no acknowledgement that the internet transforms businesses by enabling zero marginal cost economics; this changes the calculus for growth and customer acquisition, and enables business models which appear unprofitable for extended periods of time, inflating (or making pointless) traditional metrics like P/E ratiosFull disclosure: While I purchased the first edition of the book, the publisher sent me a copy of the second edition for review.

A very cliched piece of work. Did not find any value addition at all.

A fascinating insight into the influence of money on our world. It is interesting even to a non investor in reading about the historical facts which affected many aspects of our lives. Not for reading in one go but worth going back to .