Book picks similar to
Free Capital: How 12 private investors made millions in the stock market by Guy Thomas
investing
non-fiction
finance
business
University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting
Daniel Pecaut - 2017
From this front row seat, you'll see one of the greatest wealth-building records in history unfold, year by year.If you're looking for dusty old investment theory, there are hundreds of other books waiting to cure you of insomnia. However, if you're looking for an investing book that's as personal as it is revelatory, look no further.Packed with Buffett and Munger's timeless, generous, and often hilarious wisdom, University of Berkshire Hathaway will keep serious investors turning pages late into the night:• Get unique insight into the thinking, strategies, and decisions--both good and bad--that made Buffett and Munger two of the world's greatest investors. • Understand the critical reasoning that leads Buffett and Munger to purchase a particular company, including their methods for assigning value.• Learn the central tenets of Buffett's value-investing philosophy "straight from the horse's mouth."• Enjoy Munger's biting wit as he goes after any topic that offends him.• Discover Buffett's distaste for "commonly accepted strategies" like modern portfolio theory.• See why these annual meetings are often called "an MBA in a weekend."
The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
Guy Spier - 2014
In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward. Spier reveals his transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe, driven by greed, to a sophisticated investor who enjoys success without selling his soul to the highest bidder. Spier's journey is similar to the thousands that flock to Wall Street every year with their shiny new diplomas, aiming to be King of Wall Street. Yet what Guy realized just in the nick of time was that the King really lived 1,500 miles away in Omaha, Nebraska. Spier determinedly set out to create a new career in his own way. Along the way he learned some powerful lessons which include: why the right mentors and partners are critical to long term success on Wall Street; why a topnotch education can sometimes get in the way of your success; that real learning doesn't begin until you are on your own; and how the best lessons from Warren Buffett have less to do with investing and more to do with being true to yourself. Spier also reveals some of his own winning investment strategies, detailing deals that were winners but also what he learned from deals that went south. Part memoir, part Wall Street advice, and part how-to, Guy Spier takes readers on a ride through Wall Street but more importantly provides those that want to take a different path with the insight, guidance, and inspiration they need to carve out their own definition of success.
The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor
Howard Marks - 2011
After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor.Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways.Marks expounds on such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Frankly and honestly assessing his own decisions--and occasional missteps--he provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be "contrarian," Marks wisely judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of Marks's subjects proves to be the most important thing.
One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market
Peter Lynch - 1988
According to Lynch, investment opportunities are everywhere. From the supermarket to the workplace, we encounter products and services all day long. By paying attention to the best ones, we can find companies in which to invest before the professional analysts discover them. When investors get in early, they can find the “tenbaggers,” the stocks that appreciate tenfold from the initial investment. A few tenbaggers will turn an average stock portfolio into a star performer.Lynch offers easy-to-follow advice for sorting out the long shots from the no-shots by reviewing a company’s financial statements and knowing which numbers really count. He offers guidelines for investing in cyclical, turnaround, and fast-growing companies.As long as you invest for the long term, Lynch says, your portfolio can reward you. This timeless advice has made One Up on Wall Street a #1 bestseller and a classic book of investment know-how.
The Four Pillars of Investing
William J. Bernstein - 2002
Explains how independent investors can construct a superior investment portfolio by learning the four essentials of investing.
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.
Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World's Greatest Concentrated Value Investors
Allen C. Benello - 2016
Sharing the insights of these top value investors, expert authors Allen Benello, Michael van Biema, and Tobias Carlisle unveil the strategies that make concentrated value investing incredibly profitable, while at the same time showing how to mitigate risk over time. Highlighting the history and approaches of four top value investors, the authors tell the fascinating story of the investors who dare to tread where few others have, and the wildly-successful track records that have resulted. Turning the notion of diversification on its head, concentrated value investors pick a small group of undervalued stocks and hold onto them through even the lean years. The approach has been championed by Warren Buffett, the best known value investor of our time, but a small group of lesser-known investors has also used this approach to achieve outstanding returns. Discover the success of Lou Simpson, a former GEICO investment manager and eventual successor to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway Read about Kristian Siem, described as "Norway's Warren Buffett," and the success he has had at Siem Industries Concentrated Investing will quickly have you re-thinking the conventional wisdom related to diversification and learning from the top concentrated value investors the world has never heard of.
Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor
Seth A. Klarman - 1991
The myriad approaches they adopt offer little or no real prospect for long-term success and invariably run the risk of considerable economic loss - they resemble speculation or outright gambling, not a coherent investment program. But value investing - the strategy of investing in securities trading at an appreciable discount from underlying value - has a long history - has a long history of delivering excellent investment results with limited downside risk. Taking its title from Benjamin Graham's often-repeated admonition to invest always with a margin of safety, Klarman's 'Margin of Safety' explains the philosophy of value investing, and perhaps more importantly, the logic behind it, demonstrating why it succeeds while other approaches fail. The blueprint that Klarman offers, if carefully followed, offers the investor the strong possibility of investment success with limited risk. 'Margin of Safety' shows you not just how to invest but how to think deeply about investing - to understand the rationale behind the rules to appreciate why they work when they work, and why they don't when they don't.
Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing
Joel Tillinghast - 2017
They may make a lucky bet, realize a sizable profit, and find themselves full of confidence. Their next high-stakes gamble might backfire, not only hitting them in the balance sheet but also taking a mental and emotional toll. Even veteran investors can be caught off guard: a news item may suddenly cause havoc for an industry they've invested in; crowd mentality among fellow investors may skew the market; a CEO may turn out to be unprepared to effectively guide a company. How can one stay focused in such a volatile profession? If you can't trust your past successes to plan and predict, how can you avoid risky situations in the future?In Big Money Thinks Small, veteran fund manager Joel Tillinghast shows investors how to avoid making these mistakes. He offers a set of simple but crucial steps to successful investing, including: - Know yourself, how you arrive at decisions, and how you might be susceptible to self-deception.- Make decisions based on your own expertise, and do not invest in what you don't understand.- Select only trustworthy and capable colleagues and collaborators.- Learn how to identify and avoid investments with inherent flaws.- Always search for bargains, and never forget that the first responsibility of an investor is to identify mispriced stocks.Patience and methodical planning will pay far greater dividends than flashy investments. Tillinghast teaches readers how to learn from their mistakes--and his own, giving investors the tools to ask the right questions in any situation and to think objectively and generatively about portfolio management.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Peter L. Bernstein - 1996
Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
Burton G. Malkiel - 1973
At a time of frightening volatility, what is the average investor to do?The answer: turn to Burton G. Malkiel’s advice in his reassuring, authoritative, gimmick-free, and perennially best-selling guide to investing. Long established as the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio or 401(k), A Random Walk Down Wall Street now features new material on “tax-loss harvesting,” the crown jewel of tax management; the current bitcoin bubble; and automated investment advisers; as well as a brand-new chapter on factor investing and risk parity. And as always, Malkiel’s core insights—on stocks and bonds, as well as real estate investment trusts, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles— along with the book’s classic life-cycle guide to investing, will help restore confidence and composure to anyone seeking a calm route through today’s financial markets.
Market Wizards
Jack D. Schwager - 1989
What separates the world's top traders from the vast majority of unsuccessful investors? Jack Schwager sets out to answer tis question in his interviews with superstar money-makers including Bruce Kovner, Richard Dennis, Paul Tudor Jones, Michel Steinhardt, Ed Seykota, Marty Schwartz, Tom Baldwin, and more in "Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders," now in paperback and ebook.This classic interview-style investment text from a financial expert is a must-read for traders and professional financiers alike, as well as anyone interested in gaining insight into how the world of finance really works.Filled with anecdotes about market experiences, including the story of a trader who after wiping out several times, turned $30,000 into $80 million and an electrical engineer from MIT whose computerized trading has earned returns of 250,000 percent over sixteen yearsIdentifies the factors that define a successful traderNow availabe as in digital formats.One of the most insightful, bestselling trading books of all time.
Deep Value Investing: Finding bargain shares with big potential
Jeroen Bos - 2013
Written by an investor with a long and remarkable track record, it shares for the first time the ins and outs of finding high-potential undervalued stocks before anyone else.Deep value investing means finding companies that are genuine bargains that can pay back phenomenally over the long term. They are firms so cheap that even if they were to close tomorrow their assets would pay you out at a profit. But if they can turn things around, the rewards will be many times greater ...These were the favourite shares of Benjamin Graham, author of 'The Intelligent Investor'. Inspired by Graham's classic and with a long history of discovering these great value stocks - sometimes known as 'bargain issues' or 'netnets' - author and investor Jeroen Bos reveals:- how to use only publicly available information to discover these shares and filter the gold from the dross- everything he did when analysing, purchasing, monitoring and selling more than ten recent successful deep value investments- the complete philosophy behind deep value investing, and the ins and outs of this strategy in practice- what can go wrong and how to minimise the chances of it happening to you.Deep value investing has a better track record than almost any other approach to the market. Even better, it doesn't require minute and technical knowledge of a company, nor is it fixated on earnings or often-unreliable future projections.It's all about the balance sheet and patience. This makes it the perfect investing approach for those who want to see phenomenal stock market returns without wasting time or commission costs.
The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How Not to Be Your Own Worst Enemy
James Montier - 2010
Behavioral finance, which recognizes that there is a psychological element to all investor decision-making, can help you overcome this obstacle.In The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, expert James Montier takes you through some of the most important behavioral challenges faced by investors. Montier reveals the most common psychological barriers, clearly showing how emotion, overconfidence, and a multitude of other behavioral traits, can affect investment decision-making.Offers time-tested ways to identify and avoid the pitfalls of investor bias Author James Montier is one of the world's foremost behavioral analysts Discusses how to learn from our investment mistakes instead of repeating them Explores the behavioral principles that will allow you to maintain a successful investment portfolio Written in a straightforward and accessible style, The Little Book of Behavioral Investing will enable you to identify and eliminate behavioral traits that can hinder your investment endeavors and show you how to go about achieving superior returns in the process.Praise for The Little Book Of Behavioral InvestingThe Little Book of Behavioral Investing is an important book for anyone who is interested in understanding the ways that human nature and financial markets interact. --Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University, and author of Predictably IrrationalIn investing, success means�being on the right side of most trades. No book provides a better starting point toward that goal than this one. --Bruce Greenwald, Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management, Columbia Business School'Know thyself.' Overcoming human instinct is key to becoming a better investor.� You would be irrational if you did not read this book. --Edward Bonham-Carter, Chief Executive and Chief Investment Officer, Jupiter Asset ManagementThere is not an investor anywhere who wouldn't profit from reading this book. --Jeff Hochman, Director of Technical Strategy, Fidelity Investment Services LimitedJames Montier gives us a very accessible version of why we as investors are so predictably irrational, and a guide to help us channel our 'Inner Spock' to make better investment decisions. Bravo! --John Mauldin, President, Millennium Wave Investments