Good Gifts for Finance Geeks Part 1 - Big Ticket Items

If you're shopping for an office worker, finance student, MBA, professor, or similar finance geek this holiday season, let me throw out a few suggestions. This first installment is going to be some more expensive gifts, and I'll follow with a list of cheaper items. My main criteria for these expensive gifts was that they had to be something a finance person would appreciate, and something that might be a collector's item or increase in value over time. I think I achieved this with everything except for the gold, which isn't super likely to increase in value substantially, but hey you never know.

1)Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor. As the link shows, you can get this book for about $1,400, used. That's right, a $1,400 used book. I'm not going to go into the details of the book here because I haven't read it. But any value investor would be extremely happy to get a copy of this book for more reasons than one- in addition to supposedly having some great investing advice, it's also a collectors item and an investment in its own right. In fact, according to Business week, this out-of-print book was going for $700 a copy just about a year ago. Read the article and find out why former hedge fund manager Seth Klarman's book is in such high demand.

2) A framed one thousand dollar bill. That's right, a legal tender $1,000 federal reserve note. These things were never meant for circulation so the federal reserve retires them whenever it comes across one... which as you can imagine isn't too often. This thousand will set you back somewhere around $4,000, but hey, isn't it worth it? Well maybe not, but this is a gift-giving time of year.

3) Gold Coins. At somewhere around $850 a coin, five or ten of these make a great gift for the finance geek who might be starting to get sick of regular paper money backed by government promises. I recommend BlanchardOnline.com, which has great prices and service.

4) One share of Google. This will cost you like $1300, but it could be a great long-term purchase for a finance geek to hang on the wall.