Which 5 investing books have been the most influential to you?

[ni-co]

Occasionally, I read somebody's comment here saying "this book is easily in my Top 5". This got me thinking about my real Top 5 – not necessarily the 5 "best" investing books, but the 5 books that have made the largest impression on me and thereby changed the way I invest.

 

I found it surprisingly hard (and fun!) to constrain myself to only 5 titles and I'd be really curious to see your Top 5, fellow board members!

 

This is the list I came up with:

 

[*][amazonsearch]You Can Be a Stock Market Genius[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]The Little Book That Still Beats the Market[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders[/amazonsearch] – Warren Buffett

[*][amazonsearch]The Most Important Thing Illuminated[/amazonsearch] – Howard Marks

[*][amazonsearch]One Up On Wall Street[/amazonsearch] – Peter Lynch

 

No Munger, Klarman or Graham (so please don't crucify me…)

[jay21]

There are four that stand out and almost in order of how I would recommend them:

 

1. Intelligent Investor - a disposition check, not a great learning tool

2. Value Investing by Greenwald - three great valuation frameworks

3. You Can Be a Stock Market Genius - excellent way to think about how to develop ideas

4. Margin of Safety - what made it all click

 

Intelligent Investor is only there for Margin of Safety and Mr. Market.

[CorpRaider]

Occasionally, I read somebody's comment here saying "this book is easily in my Top 5". This got me thinking about my real Top 5 – not necessarily the 5 "best" investing books, but the 5 books that have made the largest impression on me and thereby changed the way I invest.

 

I found it surprisingly hard (and fun!) to constrain myself to only 5 titles and I'd be really curious to see your Top 5, fellow board members!

 

This is the list I came up with:

 

[*][amazonsearch]You Can Be a Stock Market Genius[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]The Little Book That Still Beats the Market[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders[/amazonsearch] – Warren Buffett

[*][amazonsearch]The Most Important Thing Illuminated[/amazonsearch] – Howard Marks

[*][amazonsearch]One Up On Wall Street[/amazonsearch] – Peter Lynch

 

No Munger, Klarman or Graham (so please don't crucify me…)

 

@Parsad I thought this would make a nice complementary thread to the single books threads in this forum. Or should I place it within the "General" forum?

 

Not a bad list.  Tough exercise.  I would say, in nor particular order:

 

1) Genius

2) Cunningham's arrangement of Buffett's annual letters (doesn't matter which edition really)

3) Most Important thing

4) Little book

5) Dhando 

 

I also like Lynch's books.  Have to read 1-100 and many other classics.  I like hagstom's WEB books....Lots of great choices. Marty Whitman, Ben Graham and David Dreman are great for takeaways but are absolutely brutal to suffer through reading.  Need cliff notes versions of those, sheesh.

 

[oddballstocks]

Security Analysis - Graham

One Up On Wall Street - Lynch

Financial Shenanigans - Schilit

Margin of Safety - Klarman

[nkp007]

Snowball

The Intelligent Investor

Buffett Letters 1957 - Present (read each and every word)

The Outsiders: Eight Conventional CEOs

Made in America - Sam Walton

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

 

That's six!

[PatientCheetah]

Not much to add, we all share many overlaps for good reasons

 

1) The Intelligent Investor - the book that started all, more useful than Securities Analysis IMO

2) Competition Demystified - how to understand moat

3) One up on Wall Street - finding value in a variety of situations

4) You Can Be a Stock Market Genius - special situations

5) The Most Important thing - cycles and risk management

 

Honorary mentions - The Gorilla Game, Common stocks and uncommon profits - good perspective on growthier names

 

 

[oddballstocks]

Occasionally, I read somebody's comment here saying "this book is easily in my Top 5". This got me thinking about my real Top 5 – not necessarily the 5 "best" investing books, but the 5 books that have made the largest impression on me and thereby changed the way I invest.

 

I found it surprisingly hard (and fun!) to constrain myself to only 5 titles and I'd be really curious to see your Top 5, fellow board members!

 

This is the list I came up with:

 

[*][amazonsearch]You Can Be a Stock Market Genius[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]The Little Book That Still Beats the Market[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders[/amazonsearch] – Warren Buffett

[*][amazonsearch]The Most Important Thing Illuminated[/amazonsearch] – Howard Marks

[*][amazonsearch]One Up On Wall Street[/amazonsearch] – Peter Lynch

 

No Munger, Klarman or Graham (so please don't crucify me…)

 

@Parsad I thought this would make a nice complementary thread to the single books threads in this forum. Or should I place it within the "General" forum?

 

Not a bad list.  Tough exercise.  I would say, in nor particular order:

 

1) Genius

2) Cunningham's arrangement of Buffett's annual letters (doesn't matter which edition really)

3) Most Important thing

4) Little book

5) Dhando 

 

I also like Lynch's books.  Have to read 1-100 and many other classics.  I like hagstom's WEB books....Lots of great choices. Marty Whitman, Ben Graham and David Dreman are great for takeaways but are absolutely brutal to suffer through reading.  Need cliff notes versions of those, sheesh.

 

Fascinating how different people read.  I find books on Buffett to be brutal, too many platitudes and stories, not much concrete.  On the other hand I like Graham's books and find them to be easy to read because they're concrete, same with Greenblatt's books and Lynch's books.

[txitxo]

1. "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", by E. Jaynes. A jewel of a book. A bit heavy on math, though, have a look at it before you buy it. 

 

2. "The Misbehaviour of Markets." by Mandelbrot. It makes you lose all respect for the current paradigm in Economics. Cauchy distributions are much nastier than widened Gaussians. 

 

3. "Fooled by randomness", N. Taleb. Not for his investing advice, but because he makes you think about the application of the ideas in 1 and 2  to real world situations. I think this is the best of Taleb's books.

 

4. "The intelligent investor", B. Graham. If only for the Mr. Market analogy, crucial psychological help to endure the vagaries of stock prices. 

 

5. "Quantitative value investing", Gray & Carlisle. Best recent reference on mechanical investing.

 

[LC]

Klarman's Margin of Safety

Buffett's Partnership Letters

Greenblatt's "Genius" series

Graham's Security Analysis

 

Also I enjoyed Mandelbrot's book as well, for the "pure math" argument vs. the brownian motion assumption embedded in MPT.

 

[abyli]

1. Intelligent Investor

2. Buffett Letters

3. Poor Charlie's Almanack

4. Philip Fisher Common stock and Uncommon Profits

5. You can be a Stock Market Genius

[Parsad]

1)  Buffett's Letters

2)  The Intelligent Investor

3)  Of Permanent Value

4)  Margin of Safety

5)  Security Analysis

 

If you don't include Buffett's Letters, then "Think & Grow Rich" would be on that list.  Cheers!

 

[frommi]

1. "Mastering Elliott Wave: Presenting the Neely Method: The First Scientific, Objective Approach to Market Forecasting with the Elliott Wave Theory", G.Neely

2. "Snowball", A. Schroeder

3. "The Intelligent Investor", B. Graham

4. "Quantitative value investing", Gray & Carlisle

5. "Antifragility", N. Taleb

 

My biggest mistake was only reading book 1) and then nothing for 5 years. Without 2) i would have never read 3). After 3) i`ve read nearly every value investing book out there, so don`t know if they have really added something to 3) except 4).

[Parsad]

My biggest mistake was only reading book 1) and then nothing for 5 years. Without 2) i would have never read 3).

 

Yes, I can see how that would be a very big mistake!  ;D  Cheers!

[frommi]

My biggest mistake was only reading book 1) and then nothing for 5 years. Without 2) i would have never read 3).

 

Yes, I can see how that would be a very big mistake!  ;D  Cheers!

 

But its worth reading when you know nothing about timing and want to expand your horizon :). Its just useless without the others.

[CorpRaider]

Occasionally, I read somebody's comment here saying "this book is easily in my Top 5". This got me thinking about my real Top 5 – not necessarily the 5 "best" investing books, but the 5 books that have made the largest impression on me and thereby changed the way I invest.

 

I found it surprisingly hard (and fun!) to constrain myself to only 5 titles and I'd be really curious to see your Top 5, fellow board members!

 

This is the list I came up with:

 

[*][amazonsearch]You Can Be a Stock Market Genius[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]The Little Book That Still Beats the Market[/amazonsearch] – Joel Greenblatt

[*][amazonsearch]Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders[/amazonsearch] – Warren Buffett

[*][amazonsearch]The Most Important Thing Illuminated[/amazonsearch] – Howard Marks

[*][amazonsearch]One Up On Wall Street[/amazonsearch] – Peter Lynch

 

No Munger, Klarman or Graham (so please don't crucify me…)

 

@Parsad I thought this would make a nice complementary thread to the single books threads in this forum. Or should I place it within the "General" forum?

 

Not a bad list.  Tough exercise.  I would say, in nor particular order:

 

1) Genius

2) Cunningham's arrangement of Buffett's annual letters (doesn't matter which edition really)

3) Most Important thing

4) Little book

5) Dhando 

 

I also like Lynch's books.  Have to read 1-100 and many other classics.  I like hagstom's WEB books....Lots of great choices. Marty Whitman, Ben Graham and David Dreman are great for takeaways but are absolutely brutal to suffer through reading.  Need cliff notes versions of those, sheesh.

 

Fascinating how different people read.  I find books on Buffett to be brutal, too many platitudes and stories, not much concrete.  On the other hand I like Graham's books and find them to be easy to read because they're concrete, same with Greenblatt's books and Lynch's books.

 

I liked the hagstrom ones from the 90's where he analyzed his portfolio and some of the historical decisions.  But yeah, I sort of didn't respond tightly to the original post's request of the most influential; I would have to include Intelligent Investor in that list.  Whitman just needed an editor with the stroke to force him to tighten stuff up in ACI to me and Dreman is sort of unfair to hammer him since he was intending his works to be quasi-academic.  As for most influential:

 

1) Genius

2) Intelligent Investor

3) WEB's letters in entirety

4) Most Important thing

5) Little book

5.a) Common Stocks Uncommon Profits -  I really didn't like this one much but it was influential.  Hoping 1-100 will be better, but similar.

5.b) Dhando (I really did like this one)

5.c) Fundamental Indexing by Rob Arnott and Greenblatt big secret for small investor

6) Freaknomics and probably some other Behavior Finance based works that I'm forgetting, maybe some of munger's stuff maybe what's his face from BMO's little book. 

[Guest ajc]

 

- Common Stocks And Uncommon Profits

- Damn Right! Behind The Scenes With Charlie Munger

- Making Of An American Capitalist

- One Up On Wall Street

- The Intelligent Investor

 

I also thought Fortune's Formula and the Money Masters were both good reads.

 

 

 

[constructive]

The Essays of Warren Buffett

The Intelligent Investor

The (Mis)behavior of Markets

The Alchemy of Finance (even though I understand less than half of it)

[merkhet]

In order of importance:

 

(1) Poor Charlie's Almanack

(2) You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

(3) Nudge

(4) Security Analysis

(5) Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

[CorpRaider]

 

5. "Quantitative value investing", Gray & Carlisle. Best recent reference on mechanical investing.

 

 

I'm looking forward to reading this eventually.  I've been sort of too cheap to buy it thus far, with tons of other books in my library to be read.  Did you see they are launching some ETFs?  I like the turnkey analyst site very much.

[KCLarkin]

1. Essays of Warren Buffett

2. Intelligent Investor

3. The New Buffettology

4. Common stocks and uncommon profits

5. Poor Charlie's Almanack

 

Each of these books is deeply flawed but if you read them together you can cobble together a pretty powerful philosophy.

[CorpRaider]

1. Essays of Warren Buffett

2. Intelligent Investor

3. The New Buffettology

4. Common stocks and uncommon profits

5. Poor Charlie's Almanack

 

Each of these books is deeply flawed but if you read them together you can cobble together a pretty powerful philosophy.

 

What does the new buffetology add? I haven't had a chance to read it yet and saw it was written by the ex-wife of Peter Buffett and wrote it off.

[Kraven]

Security Analysis

The Intelligent Investor

Various articles on Schloss

 

I have read just about every investment book others have listed and while many others are very good and I enjoyed many of them and learned from them, these are the things that I still find influential.

[NeverLoseMoney]

The Intelligent Investor

Margin of Safety

One Up On Wall Street

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

Free Capital - Guy Thomas

 

The last book is about 12 private investors in Great Britain. I found it useful because it showed me there are many different ways to success in investing. So it was more a motivational book.

[saltybit]

Security Analysis

The Intelligent Investor

Various articles on Schloss

 

I have read just about every investment book others have listed and while many others are very good and I enjoyed many of them and learned from them, these are the things that I still find influential.

 

Is there a good compiled collection of articles about Schloss somewhere? This was the best that I found so far:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/677842-john-huber/1765091-who-is-walter-schloss

[Kraven]

Security Analysis

The Intelligent Investor

Various articles on Schloss

 

I have read just about every investment book others have listed and while many others are very good and I enjoyed many of them and learned from them, these are the things that I still find influential.

 

Is there a good compiled collection of articles about Schloss somewhere? This was the best that I found so far:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/677842-john-huber/1765091-who-is-walter-schloss

 

Please PM me.