Inside the Investments of Warren Buffett: Twenty Cases


Yefei Lu - 2016
    But how did they know they were making the right investments? What did Buffet and his partners look for in an up-and-coming company, and how can others replicate their approach?A gift to Buffett followers who have long sought a pattern to the investor's success, Inside the Investments of Warren Buffett presents the most detailed analysis to date of Buffett's long-term investment portfolio. Yefei Lu, an experienced investor, starts with Buffett's interest in the Sanborn Map Company in 1958 and tracks nineteen more of his major investments in companies like See's Candies, the Washington Post, GEICO, Coca-Cola, US Air, Wells Fargo, and IBM. Accessing partnership letters, company documents, annual reports, third-party references, and other original sources, Lu pinpoints what is unique about Buffett's timing, instinct, use of outside knowledge, and postinvestment actions, and he identifies what could work well for all investors in companies big and small, domestic and global. His substantial chronology accounts for broader world events and fluctuations in the U.S. stock market, suggesting Buffett's most important trait may be the breadth of his expertise.

The Millionaire Mind


Thomas J. Stanley - 2001
    Stanley, Ph.D., answers these questions and provides us with further insight into the thoughts and lives of this wealthy segment of the population in The Millionaire Mind. A follow-up to Stanley's New York Times bestseller, The Millionaire Next Door, The Millionaire Mind may surprise readers with its findings about the kinds of people that millionaires really are. Interestingly, many millionaires were not straight-A students in high school, nor did they attend prestigious colleges. Instead, they were often told when they were younger that they were not bright and that they would not be successful. These challenges taught them how to surmount obstacles and motivated them to try harder and to take risks to get ahead financially. The major risks that these millionaires have taken and continue to take are financial ones. They must overcome the fear of taking risks, and they must maintain this courage throughout their adult careers. Stanley discovered that many millionaires share similarities in techniques to allay their anxieties and stay on track financially. Some of these include: Believing in myself Counting my blessings every day Countering negativethoughtswith positive ones Sharing concerns with spouse Visualizing success Outworking, outthinking, out-toughing the competition Hiring talented advisors Constantly upgrading my knowledge about my occupation Spending considerable time planning my success Exercising regularly Having strong religious faith Stanley also reveals that millionaires are very often successful in marriage as well as in work (the typical millionaire has been married to the same spouse for over twenty-five years) and that they usually lead relatively frugal, economically productive lifestyles. Perhaps most interesting to readers will be the section that Stanley devotes to how millionaires chose the career in which they would be most likely to succeed. So don't miss out on picking apart and analyzing the thoughts and habits of millionaires with Thomas Stanley and The Millionaire Mind, a book sure to be as brilliantly revealing and fascinating as his previous bestseller on millionaires. Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D., is a researcher, author, and lecturer. He has studied the wealthy for more than 25 years. The Millionaire Next Door, published in 1996, has sold more than one million copies in hardcover and nearly one million in paperback. The book has been on The New York Times Best Sellers list for more than 150 combined weeks. His previous books include Marketing to the Affluent, which Best of Business Quarterly named one of 10 outstanding business books, Selling to the Affluent, and Networking with the Affluent. Dr. Stanley lives in Atlanta. He was a professor of marketing at Georgia State University, where he was named Omicron Delta Kappa Outstanding Professor. He holds his doctorate from the University of Georgia in Athens.

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger


Charles T. Munger - 2005
    Edited by Peter D. Kaufman. Brand New.

The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing


Jason Kelly - 1998
    Since the dot.com crash and ensuing bear market, significant changes have come about in the investing world, and The Neatest Little Guide takes this into account. In this revised edition, readers will learn: € Strategies on how to double the Dow with one simple investment and the latest products required for this approach € Methods investors can use to avoid disasters such as Enron and WorldCom € Thoroughly updated reference lists, including new websites, new software, new brokers, and new publications With the right information for investors to keep pace, and rooted in the principles that made it invaluable from the start, The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing is a resource that no serious investor can be without.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars


Jim Paul - 1994
    In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors.This book—winner of a 2014 Axiom Business Book award gold medal—begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped Paul achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to Paul's $1.6 million loss and the essential lessons he learned from it—primarily that, although there are as many ways to make money in the markets as there are people participating in them, all losses come from the same few sources.Investors lose money in the markets either because of errors in their analysis or because of psychological barriers preventing the application of analysis. While all analytical methods have some validity and make allowances for instances in which they do not work, psychological factors can keep an investor in a losing position, causing him to abandon one method for another in order to rationalize the decisions already made. Paul and Moynihan's cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite


Sebastian Mallaby - 2010
    Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-first ­century capitalism. Ken Griffin of Citadel started out trading convertible bonds from his dorm room at Harvard. Julian Robertson staffed his hedge fund with college athletes half his age, then he flew them to various retreats in the Rockies and raced them up the mountains. Paul Tudor Jones posed for a magazine photograph next to a killer shark and happily declared that a 1929-style crash would be "total rock-and-roll" for him. Michael Steinhardt was capable of reducing underlings to sobs. "All I want to do is kill myself," one said. "Can I watch?" Steinhardt responded. Finance professors have long argued that beating the market is impossible, and yet drawing on insights from physics, economics, and psychology, these titans have cracked the market's mysteries and gone on to earn fortunes. Their innovation has transformed the world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and rewriting the rules of capitalism. More than just a history, More Money Than God is a window on tomorrow's financial system. Hedge funds have been left for dead after past financial panics: After the stock market rout of the early 1970s, after the bond market bloodbath of 1994, after the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and yet again after the dot-com crash in 2000. Each time, hedge funds have proved to be survivors, and it would be wrong to bet against them now. Banks such as CitiGroup, brokers such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, home lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurers such as AIG, and money market funds run by giants such as Fidelity-all have failed or been bailed out. But the hedge fund industry has survived the test of 2008 far better than its rivals. The future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds.

Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!


Phil Town - 2006
    As a guy who barely made a living as a river guide, I considered the whole process pretty impenetrable, and I was convinced that to do it right you had to make it a full-time job. Me, I was more interested in having full-time fun.So I was tempted to do what you’re probably doing right now: letting some mutual fund manager worry about growing your nest egg. Let me tell you why that decision could one day make you absolutely miserable. The fact is, because of natural market cycles, the mutual fund industry is likely to soon be facing twenty years of flat returns. That means that if you’ve got your nest egg tucked away in funds—especially the type found in most 401ks—your egg won’t get much bigger than it is now. Translation: Get ready for a retirement filled with lots of cold cuts, plenty of quality TV-watching time, and a place to live that’s too small to accommodate your visiting kids.In this book I’ll show you how I turned $1,000 into $1 million in only five years, and then proceeded to make many millions more. I came to investing as a person who wasn’t great at math, possessed zero extra cash, and wanted a life—not an extra three hours of work to do every day.Fortunately, I was introduced to The Rule.Rule #1, as famed investor Warren Buffett will tell you, is don’t lose money. Through an intriguing process that I’ll clarify in this book, not losing money results in making more money than you ever imagined. What it comes down to is buying shares of companies only when the numbers—and the intangibles—are on your side. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s because the mind-set I’ll be introducing you to leads not to bets but to certainties. Believe me, if there were anything genius-level about this, I’d still be a river guide collecting unemployment much of the year.Part of the secret is thinking of yourself as a business owner rather than a stock investor. Part is taking advantage of today’s new Internet tools, which drastically reduce the “homework factor.” (We’re talking a few minutes, tops.) Part is knowing the only five numbers that really count in valuing a potential investment. And part—maybe the most important part—is using the risk-free Rule #1 approach to consistently pay a mere 50 cents to buy a dollar’s worth of a business.What I won’t waste your time with is fluff: a lot of vague parables reminding you of what you already know and leaving you exactly where you started. This is the real deal, folks: a start-to-finish, one-baby-step-at-a-time approach that will allow you to retire ten years sooner than you planned, with more creature comforts than you ever imagined.Also available as a Random House AudioBook and eBook.

Bull!: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004


Maggie Mahar - 2003
    Then, the market rose and rapidly gained speed until it peaked above 11,000. Noted journalist and financial reporter Maggie Mahar has written the first book on the remarkable bull market that began in 1982 and ended just in the early 2000s. For almost two decades, a colorful cast of characters such as Abby Joseph Cohen, Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget, and Alan Greenspan came to dominate the market news.This inside look at that 17-year cycle of growth, built upon interviews and unparalleled access to the most important analysts, market observers, and fund managers who eagerly tell the tales of excesses, presents the period with a historical perspective and explains what really happened and why.

Warren Buffett's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor


Jeremy Miller - 2016
    Over the course of that time—a period in which he experienced an unprecedented record of success—Buffett wrote semiannual letters to his small but growing group of partners, sharing his thoughts, approaches, and reflections.Compiled for the first time and with Buffett’s permission, the letters spotlight his contrarian diversification strategy, his almost religious celebration of compounding interest, his preference for conservative rather than conventional decision making, and his goal and tactics for bettering market results by at least 10% annually. Demonstrating Buffett’s intellectual rigor, they provide a framework to the craft of investing that had not existed before: Buffett built upon the quantitative contributions made by his famous teacher, Benjamin Graham, demonstrating how they could be applied and improved.Jeremy Miller reveals how these letters offer us a rare look into Buffett’s mind and offer accessible lessons in control and discipline—effective in bull and bear markets alike, and in all types of investing climates—that are the bedrock of his success. Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules paints a portrait of the sage as a young investor during a time when he developed the long-term value-oriented strategy that helped him build the foundation of his wealth—rules for success every investor needs today.

Warren Buffett: The Ultimate Guide To Investing like Warren Buffet. Learn the Warren Buffet Way, the Warren Buffett Portfolio and the Warren Buffett Stocks


Richard Borrows - 2015
    Learn the Warren Buffet Way, the Warren Buffett Portfolio and the Warren Buffett Stocks The stock market has developed a reputation among the people of the world as a mystical entity. It has become a realm with the top closed in on Wall Street with a circle of seemingly impenetrable suits even though the reality is that anyone can become an investor. Although the average Joe might be at an immediate disadvantage in terms of safety funds and insider knowledge on the best deals and short term fluctuations of a stock, there are most definitely options such as mutual funds like index funds that are easy to use and relatively safe in comparison to filling a portfolio with a narrow range of risky securities. Warren Buffett is known today as a massively successful entrepreneur and investor. However, all successful people had to make their way from the beginning, Warren Buffett included. It is often both inspiring and a key to understanding to look at a successful person’s journey to success, and so in this book I cover Warren Buffett’s success story, the Warren Buffett Way, his portfolio and stocks, quotes, and tips. I hope that with this book, you will not only learn to be a smart investor, but become successful in more ways than one while gaining insight into the business world as a whole. Specific topics covered in this book include: ● Warren Buffett’s Road to Success ● The Warren Buffett Way ● The Warren Buffett Portfolio ● The Warren Buffett Stocks ● Motivational Warren Buffett Quotes ● Final Warren Buffett Investing Tips

Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports


Howard Schilit - 1993
    This work contains chapters, data, and research that reveal contemporary shenanigans that have been known to fool even veteran researchers.

The Aggressive Conservative Investor


Martin J. Whitman - 1979
    Regulation, disclosure, and other things may change, but the general approach and mindset to successful investing are timeless. Read this book and you will learn the rudiments of 'safe and cheap' investing. An essential read for every amateur and professional investor. --Stan Garstka, Deputy Dean & Professor in the Practice of Faculty & Management, Yale School of Management Security analysis toward both better odds and higher long-term payoff: A readable, authoritative guide. --Professor Bill Baumol, New York UniversityIn reading this book, one is struck by the simplicity of the ideas and the dependence of the investor on his own understandings of reality as opposed to the myths on the street. The updated version of this 1979 classic incorporates all the modern financial engineering that has occurred as a product of the late 20th century, and the new methodologies refine your abilities to measure risk but don't change the fundamentals of value. The updated version of The Aggressive Conservative Investor is very much a value-added proposition. --Sam Zell, Chairman, Equity Group Investment LLCI concur with those people who regard Marty Whitman as the 'Dean of Value Investing.' This book is a must-read for everyone interested in understanding the art of investing. --Melvin T. Stith, Dean, Whitman School of Management, Syracuse UniversityThis no-holds-barred presentation of one of the most successful investment strategies of all time -- value investing in distressed securities/companie -- shows you how to analyze and evaluate stocks just like controlling owners. Based on the assumption that stock price rarely reflects real value, authors Whitman and Shubik use numerous case studies to present risk-minimizing methods that also provide high rewards. Still relevant today, this classic work includes a new introduction discussing the dramatic changes that have taken place in the value investing world since its first publication in 1979.

Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation


Edward Chancellor - 1996
    A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day.Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed--and not changed--over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity"; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning


David Chilton - 1989
    The narrator, Dave, a 28-year-old school teacher and expectant father, his 30-year-old sister, Cathy, who runs a small business, and his buddy, Tom, who works in a refinery, sit around a barber shop in Sarnia, Ontario, and listen as Ray Miller, the well-to-do barber, teaches them how to get rich. The friends are at the age when most people start thinking about their future stability; among the three of them, they face almost every broad situation that can influence a financial plan. Ray, the Socrates of personal finance, isn't a pin-striped Bay Street wizard. He is a simple, down-to-earth barber dispensing homespun wisdom while he lops a little off the top. Ray's barbershop isn't the place to learn strategies for trading options and commodities. Instead, his advice covers the basics of RRSPs, mutual funds, real estate, insurance, and the like. His first and most important rule is "pay yourself first." Take 10 per cent off every pay cheque as it comes in and invest it in safe interest-bearing instruments. Through the magic of compound interest, this 10 per cent will turn into a substantial nest egg over time. This book isn't about how to get rich quick. It's about how to get rich slowly and stay that way.

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street


Peter L. Bernstein - 1991
    Bernstein brings to life a variety of brilliant academics who have contributed to modern investment theory over the years: Louis Bachelier, Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, Franco Modigliani, and Merton Miller. Filled with in-depth insights and timeless advice, Capital Ideas reveals how the unique contributions of these talented individuals profoundly changed the practice of investment management as we know it today.