Good For Intermediate Investors, but not for Beginners
926826
Being written by one of the most influential investors of the last hundred years, it came as no surprise to me that the investment advice in this book was good and quite sound. Graham takes a defensive approach to investing that encourages smart decision making, reducing risk as much as possible, and ensuring that you are getting returns throughout the good and the bad years of the stock market. To supplement grahams writing, Jason Zweig comments at the end of every chapter often explaining grahams theories and advice in a much more summarized and easy to follow manor. Zweig does a great job of modernizing grahams thoughts through the use of modern day facts and examples.

The downside to this book is that Grahams information is outdated to a significant degree to the point where many parts of his investing strategy are irrelevant or need much revision. Grahams final version of the writing (the version in this book) is current as of the 1970's which is over 30 years ago. While many principles of the stock market and investing remain timeless, much has changed. Grahams writing doesn't take into account modern innovations such as the internet, exchange trade funds, discount brokers and changing industries. Perhaps the greatest folly relative to modern times is Grahams heavy emphasis on the investment in bonds. At the time of his writing bonds returned anywhere between 4 and 8 percent, rates which are unheard of today. Because of this much of his advice and heavy emphasis on bond investment is sorely outdated. Finally much of Grahams writing is very hard to understand if you are not already heavily knowledgeable about investing. The book was clearly written for experienced people who wish to dive deeper into investment theory and strategy. For the beginner, I would honestly recommend skipping Grahams writing and just reading Zweigs commentary.

Pros:
-Good investment theory and strategy for the intermediate to experienced investor
-Outstanding commentary by Zweig

Cons:
-Grahams writing is very outdated
-The book is very heavy in strategy and theory to the point where it is a pretty dry read
2355376
After talking to Scott a fair amount on Facebook, I decided to give his book a try.

Let me say right away that I don't embrace the same investment strategy that Scott does. As founder of www.netnethunter.com, I'm pretty obsessed with net net stocks. That being said, I'm giving this book as detached and balanced of a review as I can.

Scott's book is written for people who are just starting out in investing -- new investors. If you're looking to stat out as an investor, then this book is a good first initial read to get a broad range of terms and strategies under your belt. Scott's writing is accessible and he's able to break down complex concepts into small pieces that are easy to digest.

His focus is mainly on Warren Buffett's contemporary investment strategies and he does a good job explaining them for readers. He also talks about a number of other contemporary investment strategies, such as weighted average cost of capital, but also touches on small pieces of Ben Graham.

Where this book shines is in the talk of investment temperament. This is critically valuable for new investors, and something that's more or less ignored in other investing books despite how critically important it is to your success.

This book is great, but not perfect. If there was a greater breadth (or an equal amount of pages devoted to) a wider range of investment styles, and these strategies were covered in more depth, then it would have been an easy 5 stars. That's not the book he intended to write, though, and for what it is it's great.

If you're interested, I wrote a much more detailed review here: http://www.netnethunter.com/art-science-of-value-investing-a-book-review/
2980723
As a Tasty Trader (look it up on the Internet), I was interested in a deeper understanding of selling option premium.  This book is a high level introduction to options followed up by one way to sell premium. It tries to walk you through your first trade to get you started.

Ignoring the lack of proof reading of the book, I think it doesn't do a very good job. It might work to get people interested in options and with further reading of other books and then coming back to reading the trading strategy to try out. While the trade strategy is good, I don't think the proper groundwork is presented to the reader. Concepts are sometimes mentioned and rarely explained (for a reader new to options). Approaches are mentioned and procedures are mentioned, but not explained enough for a reader a actually use.  Having followed Tasty Trade (the founder created thinkorswim mentioned in the book), I understood the ideas trying to be discussed or glossed over but someone new would be lost. However the suggested trading strategy is sound (similar to Liz&Jenny show "Wheel of Fortune" on TT).

I don't agree with the analysis that only naked puts are appropriate.  The reasons argued against credit spreads and iron condors also apply against naked puts, but naked puts are more disastrous to the trader.  Those strategies benefits are also discounted, but extremely important to smaller accounts.  Due to long tail risk, they are actually safer to a trading account and less impacted by increased volatility.  I still agree naked puts are a good strategy, just not the only good one.  Note: naked puts require experience trading options before a brokerage firm will let a client sell them. This is at odds with the intro to options attempted by the book.

The stocks to trade need to consider liquidity, volume, and spread.  The book should mention rolling ITM puts to collect more premium as a management strategy. The probabilities are not correctly mentioned in the book.  A one standard deviation put is at the 32 delta (68% OTM) and a one standard deviation strangle or iron condor uses a 16 delta (84% OTM) short put/call (because either side can be hit and the profit area is 68%). When talking about risk reward trade offs (not really discussed), there is no understanding that they are similar.  Overall, the expected P/L on the undefined risk trade is higher, but not significantly.  Higher OTM means more likely to be out of the money,but lower premium and larger losses when they go ITM, so there is a trade off to consider.  Talking about management techniques to improve profitability would also help.  From Tasty Trade research, closing at 50% max profit can turn a one standard deviation strangle (expected 68% OTM) to have a roughly 83% or higher probability of success. With rolling 53% of loosing trades can be profitable after about one roll. These types of strategies turn an even profitability trade into a likely steady income.

This book shows one of the better trades that not even options floor traders get nor recommend in their books.  As a result I think the book is on the right path.
3923228
This is for traders with no/limited data crunching skill. Augen describes some useful applications of excel for extracting actionable information out of historical data and provides some VBA code line that the reader can re-use in his/her own work. The whole book is structured in a way that takes the reader from a problem that needs to be solved, to picking the right approach and gathering the tools, to the step by step demonstration of the work. You will build standard deviation spikes charts, compare short term time series correlation coefficients, etc. Complexity slowly increases throughout the book.
This is a good primer and easy enough to understand for the ones who have never opened their VBA editor before. However the technical content is of little benefit to more advanced users. This audience will nonetheless still find value in following Augen's overall thought process.
4 stars as the book does the advertised job, but could have been a lot thicker. I would love an advanced version.
3613199
This short book focuses on how to make investment decisions, not on what investment decisions to make.  It isn't complicated, and it isn't groundbreaking, but it will be very valuable to investors who incorporate its principals into their investment approach.  That's because it moves the focus from financial instruments to personal financial goals, stressing that investment isn't about being right or wrong, it is about being able to do things that you want to do in the future.  The book's maxims include  1) There's no one right investment  2) Nobody can predict the market, so why bother trying  3) Don't pay attention to "experts", and -- most important -- 4) try to keep your emotions out of your investment behavior.  I would recommend this book enthusiastically, particularly to someone who is either scared of dealing with money, or just getting into it.
711448
This is a great book. But it is a book for experienced traders, and not for novices. I'd say have the knowledge of at least CMT lvl 1 and two years of experience, plus some academic background.

It is a misleadingly easy-to-read book, and it may contain some stuff one could understand and yet do not understand in all its implications. A high level of proficiency at TA is expected from the reader and a degree of mathematical thinking. Yet, this is not a prerequisite to read the book, but is vital to understand the concepts and the idea of intuition in trading.

Faith uses the word intuition in accordance with the Latin usage (translated as insight), but contrary to the usual English meaning. Intuition here means more like an insight, or even an experience--not some vague idea of buying and selling following your gut. That being said, the title of the book is wrong--if I were Faith, i'd use "Intuition and trading", or "Heuristics of trading", but then again, it is often the publishers (to the best of my knowledge and personal experience) who dictate the use of certain titles, rather than others which might be more appropriate. But that being said, I think Faith has made a real contribution to the available literature on TA and trading, since i think his point was not to undermine system trading, but rather to suggest a thing I learned the hard way (trading FX), that there is a common mistake that undermines most traders. Too much analysis (in Faith terms--left brain). Decisions should be quick, decisive, thought-out, and not careful, analysed and calculated. But of course, this doesnt mean not to analyse at all! I remember one passage from Faith's book, regarding chart highs/lows...he said, if it does not seem an obvious high at first glance, it is not a high. In my opinion this is a great insight... for me, the question is how many traders see what--if one trader (non-retail) sees a level, it won't matter much--but those levels Faith talks about are levels every trader will see as he opens the chart. In contrast to classical TA, Faith would say that this visible-at-first-glance-level is more important than a not so visible level which has been tested, let's say, three times (triple tops)-- if those two criteria overlap, it is great! and only then, one should trade the top (bottom).

Overall, this book seems much easier to read than most TA textbooks, but it is much more difficult to understand. You must have an idea of risk managment, you must have a profitable trading system and a profitable discretionary approach. Then you can benefit from this book. Especially if you are trading daily timeframes and up, where you won't have the opportunity to backtest an idea on enough data (e.g. how to back-test a weekly discretionary system on EUR/USD?). In this way a long term trader is like an astronomer--he must observe, he cannot experiment. And observations are stored as experiences, and experiences are intuitions (insights).

This being said, this book deals in discretionary trading. If it were a book on Trading Systems, I'd say it would really be a book on optimization, so in a way this book is on the optimization of discretionary trading. It will not give you a system, it will not teach you any strategy, but if you are profitable, it will teach you how to be much more profitable.

It is a good book to buy, but it is not the Holy Grail, nor a Bible of trading: in terms of how much you should pay, I'd say 15 USD-- the list price of 25 USD is a bit too much, so use the Amazon discount they offer from time to time.
2317150
There are two parts to retirement: the accumulation years when you build up financial resources and the later, income years where you receive income from various government, pension and personal sources. From the title, this book obviously focuses on the less-frequently discussed income years. The accumulation years - which tend to be driven by the selling of investment "products" such as mutual funds, GICs, RRSPs - are well covered by other works. This book is written for Canadians and uses all the familiar Canadian acronyms and taxation terminology.

This book is heavy going particularly in the various tax implications. That's because it's written by a financial expert who advises clients on how to structure their various retirement income sources most efficiently from a tax and estate planning perspective. It's just too technical for the average reader to absorb but it does give potential retirees some idea of what they need to consider and discuss with their advisers. This book could have used more baby steps in explaining the various tax terms and concepts to laymen.

To me, the subtitle (A Six-Step Plan to Design and Build a Secure Retirement) would indicate this book is a participatory workbook or planner where it leads you step-by-step to come up with a plan. Beware: it does NOT do this even though there is a PDF form on the associated website that could potentially help.

After reading this book I have come to this conclusion: The withdrawal of income from the many available retirement assets, in the most tax efficient manner possible, is far too complex to be done by the average person. This is unlike the accumulation years where things like asset allocation within a RRSP are much easier to grasp and could be done by anyone who's interested.

Just find yourself a good adviser in these matters.
3271077
I didn't really get what I expected from this book; however, that was mostly my fault for not carefully understanding the book's intended purpose.  This is a well written book, but I was already sold on the benefits of index investing.  I was looking for a book with some practical advice about the nature of index funds and and choosing index funds.  Sadly for me the 195 pages offered little more than I got from the book's 9 page Foreward.  But this is exactly what the book intended.  It's only purpose is to make the case that----most of time----- "passive" index investing will beat the active investor during both up and down markets.  Charles Ellis reports that this was not always the case, but in today's market where price discovery is immediate for almost everyone it is hard for even the smartest investment manager to find an edge and beat the market.

So if your investments have been taking a beating and you want a reasoned argument to switch to index investing this book is for you.  If you're already sold on index investing but want more information about the nature of index funds or how to chose them then this is NOT the book for you.
3196616
This is another intro book for investors. There is nothing much here that hasn't been said in hundreds of other investment books. This book has aged now and could use a major update with new chapters and a discussion of the 2008 downturn. It is an interesting book about stock markets and investor behavior up to 1999. Winning the Investment Marathon describes mistakes made in the past you can learn from. It provides some good historical examples but few nuggets of wisdom will shake out. There is an introduction dedicated to Edward Jones saying the book was written for clients of that investment firm. If you already know the basics you can safely skip this one because you won't learn anything new. While this isn't a bad book it's a very light read.

Since it is now out of print, check out Smart Women Finish Rich for an intro to investing. For sophisticated investors, read the works of Benjamin Graham.
655228
A lot of good information, very interesting read. However, if you come from a background that doesnt know anything about stocks, this won't make you a stock expert, and i really don't think you will become confident enough to start on your own after this. I do recommend that you read many many books, and can definitely use this as a source. I received this product at a highly discounted rate in exchange for an honest review.
1989290
I do agree with the comment of a reviewer anonymous that this book should be titled "Commodity Trading for Dummies". Well, if I wear the hat of a pro, this book is far from compleat. However, for those who have less than a year's experience in trading or investment, and would like to know enough not to go broke, this book suits them well with trading psychology, strategies (futures and options, though I doubt whether beginners should trade options at all), TA (waves, moving averages and trendlines), some fundamental info about different types of commodities, and common things that a novice needs to know in a well written, easily apprehensible Rule 1/2/3... Step 1/2/3...manner with sufficent number of charts.

As I mentioned above, this book will not help you earn money, but for sure you will lose less. In short, conditionally recommended.
2817740
I've read through the other reviews and people seem very polarized over this book.  Either you love it or you hate it, but there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. I would like to make an argument for that middle ground.
The book is quite readable.  Although it conveys some useful information, it is not as dry as many books on investing.  Each chapter is actually penned by a different author, but the text flows well from subject to subject.  It reads more like a lengthy magazine article than a book.  Although the informal and almost conversational tone of the prose makes for light and quick reading, the authors do convey some practical advice.  The book is full of references to various websites (and not just their website, street.com) for researching stocks.  Although this is extremely useful for the internet-savvy investor, it may tend to date this book. I suspect it will become less useful as it becomes farther away from its publication date.  It covers the major aspects of fundamental analysis well, and has a particularly good chapter on when to sell a stock (and its relative tax implications), which is often missing from comparable investment books.  Although it touches upon technical analysis and charting, the discussion is very superficial and is better addressed in other references.
Overall, it's a useful book and even somewhat fun to read. It is by no means comprehensive and probably not the only investing book you'll ever need.  But as an amateur investor with a moderate amount of experience, I found enough to justify the purchase price and even enjoyed reading it too.
3877956
As a Computational Finance student, I would say this book is a good overview of algo trading. I liked how he utilized programs like Excel and Matlab, but felt somewhat shortchanged because of the section about the fully automated algorithmic system.

It was surprising to see him spend a few pages on how to set up a basic semi-automated algo system, but only spend about one page on how to set up a basic fully automated algo system. Hopefully this area will be expanded upon in a later edition.

Hence, although the book is good, it cannot be used solely as a how-to guide as the title suggests.

To have a proper foundation in algo trading, I think this book should be used along with "Inside the Black Box" and "All about High Frequency Trading".

PS - Regarding the one star reviews. I don't think the topic is too difficult to understand. There was a quote in "Inside the Black Box" where Mr. Narang says something along the lines of "a person who is serious about algo trading would probably already know most of the material in the book".

I think the issue is not that the book is too difficult, but that it is not difficult enough. Ironically, I think the author violated his own quote about Einstein, "Make things as simple as possible - but not simpler".
4119916
I like Milt's style. Direct and no hype. This is a good book for the real estate investor who has either read several books on real estate investment (especially the over-hyped no-money down types) and/or has begun a modest investment program and wants to go to the next level.
I would not recommend this book for anyone who has already had substantial experience in real estate investment as many of the ideas that the author presents will seem overly simplistic.
The author's assertion that the numbers work the same whether purchasing a smaller property or larger simply didn't ring true to me and don't bear out in the real world. There is a huge difference between investing in a 4-plex and a 40-unit apartment building.
Nonetheless, it's a book worth reading and to refer back to.
Edvard Redding Richards
Author of Fire Your IRA !
4836680
For those with a finance or accounting background like me the author may dumb it down a little too much at times.  I still found this book very useful in gaining a basic understanding of the way one of the world's best investors, Warren Buffett, goes about his business.  Is it all encompassing, no. Is it a good.starting point, definitely.
2071654
Mary Buffett like many other authors tries to sell books by using Warren Buffett's name. I don't find anything wrong with that as long as they add value to their readers and I think she has with her newest book. Many individual investors (and sadly even professional statements) buy stocks of companies without looking at companies' financial statements. Yes, they can be very boring to read especially if you do not know what to look for. The authors of this book do a nice job in explaining what some of the numbers mean and more importantly what to look for. The stuff that they talk about is very basic but I think even more advanced investors can gain a few (not a lot) new insights.  The book is poorly edited and redundant. Overall, how much you end up liking this book is significantly related to how much you already know about investing in equities.
2907262
Rich dad, Poor Dad is not exactly the Wealth of Nations nor the Millionaire next door-but it's worth reading. On one level it's an interesting book to motivate you financially. On a deeper level it makes you question some basic principals of parenting, financial habits learned from your parents, and pecuniary prudence (my fancy way of saying the philosophy of dealing with money).
Several of his schemes on how to make money (buying foreclosed property and turning it over for profit) are now used by so many people that it's rare to find such a great deal anymore--it's a good tip nonetheless.
Kiyosaki pounds home some basic (some controversial) points about assets and liabilities--he asserts that your house should be thought of as a liability not an asset like other properties because of how homeowners tend to think and spend unrealistically on their own home.
The title gets its name from the core philosophies of two men, one Kiyosaki's natural father (well educated poor dad) and his friend's father and (high-school educated rich dad). The book includes many examples of what his rich dad would say versus his poor dad. Poor Dad would say: The love of money is the root of all evil, I cant afford it and I'm not rich because of you kids. The Rich Dad would say: The lack of money is the root of all evil, How can I afford it? and I'm rich because of you kids.
As other reviewers have mentioned, this book is great for beginning investors but also provides some great new real-estate ideas to more advanced investors.