The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) (Collins Business Essentials)

Category: Investing
Author: Benjamin Graham
4.5
All Hacker News 12
This Year Reddit 52
This Month Reddit 3

Comments

by UserNotFoundError666   2021-12-10

An hour a day devoted to learning about stocks is a solid plan. I would suggest that the very first book you read be "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham who was Warren Buffetts mentor at Columbia University and taught Buffett how to use the Value Investing approach https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

This is a dense read and you should approach it as if you were taking a course and studying for a final exam. Get yourself a notebook and write down all of that golden info buried in each chapter. Keep in mind this book was first written in 1949 and the format of it and the financial language may be difficult to get through but take your time, don't rush through it, take notes, highlight paragraphs, and absorb the information you'll be glad you did in the future.

​

Below is essentially a list of things I wish I could have told myself years ago in order to save a lot of heartache and lost money. Hopefully it helps you to avoid a lot of painful lessons that I learned the hard way.

  • Study "value investing" in depth. Ignore the people who say Value Investing doesn't work, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Joel Greenblatt, Peter Lynch, Mario Gabelli, Mohnish Pabrai, etc... have made fortunes buying companies at discounts using the value investing approach.
  • After reading The Intelligent Investor further educate yourself on value investing by reading about the above investors, some have written book themselves others have had many books written about them. Also checkout r/SecurityAnalysis
  • As a beginner invest heavily in a broad based index fund that cover the whole S&P500 (VTSAX, SPY, etc...) and only devote a small percentage of your portfolio at first to stocks you've selected until you get your feet wet.
  • Ignore the financial media at all costs (Mad Money, Fast Money, Squawk Box, basically everything on CNBC...) they will lead you down a dark path that mostly resembles gambling as opposed to investing.
  • Be in it for the long haul. Do not day trade. Find undervalued companies with great management teams that have been beaten up by the market and buy shares that you know should be valued at $50 on sale for $25 dollars when the conditions are right. As Buffett has said imagine that you have a punchcard that has 20 tickets and each time you buy a company a ticket gets punched all you get for your whole life is just those 20 companies. You would want to take your time and analyze each company to ensure you're making the right decision before you buy.
  • Don't spend 10 minutes even thinking about buying a companies shares unless you are comfortable enough with your decision to hold it for 10 years.
  • Do not trade options, futures, forex, etc.... as a beginner just stick with equities at first. Get some experience under your belt and then if you want to tred into these waters later do so, but with caution.
  • There are some decent financial advisors out there but there are also lot more not worth their salt. It's good to talk to them once in a while but take their advice with caution, no one will safeguard your money or care about it as much as you do. Also most of them get paid commissions for putting you into whatever investments will give them the highest commission so look for a "fee-only" advisor if you're going use one. Trust me your financial advisor will still sleep like a baby if he loses your entire life saving, how will you sleep though?
  • Pay no attention to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) this is some academic mumbo jumbo out of the University of Chicago that tries to make the case that markets are always efficient, it's been in most financial textbooks for decades and like most things learned in college is complete bullshit. Markets are very emotional and prone to all types of irrational behavior because well people are very emotional and irrational at times....especially when money is on the line.
  • Pay attention to large scale macro-economic conditions such as the current 10-2 year bond yield inversion that just happened a few days ago and has been a signal that has preceded the last 5 recessions. Usually a recession doesn't occur for 12-18 months out after the yields invert and there's no guarantee that it will happen just be aware of it and other macro economic indicators so you know where the economy is in the business cycle. This will allow you to take advantage of certain buying opportunities when prices are depressed.
  • Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
by UserNotFoundError666   2021-12-10

If you want to know how Warren Buffett invests just read "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

After that read "Security Analysis" by Graham and Dodd. With these 2 books alone you will have a deep understanding of how to invest like Buffett.

https://www.amazon.com/Security-Analysis-Foreword-Buffett-Editions/dp/0071592539/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=security+analysis&qid=1565532515&s=books&sr=1-2

TLDR: Benjamin Graham was Buffett's mentor, taught him how to invest, and wrote everything down in his books so that you can do the same. Also you could just buy BRK.B (or BRK.A if you've got the cash) shares and let Buffett do all the work for you.

Sub about Value Investing /r/SecurityAnalysis/

Some background info if you're interested... after Warren Buffett graduated from Penn he applied to Harvard for graduate school but was rejected and ended up at Columbia University instead. Ben Graham was one of his professors at Columbia. Graham was incredibly intelligent, he grew up poor in NYC and received a full scholarship to attend Columbia and by the time he graduated he was offered tenure as a professor in 3 separate departments (Mathematics, English, and Philosophy) but he declined those offers and went off to Wall Street instead where he was credited at the time for creating systems on how on invest based off of specific signals and criteria instead of blindly gambling in the market. Graham later returned to academia because he wanted to write a book on the investing techniques he created. This is when Buffett and Graham crossed paths at Columbia. Buffett studied Graham's investing style and it obviously worked out well for him, he credits Graham to this day as being his mentor and says he still reads The Intelligent Investor every so often.

by Blahkbustuh   2021-12-10

This sort of thing is like getting hit by lightning.

Imagine this: if you were around in the early 1900's, which car company would you have invested in? There were hundreds of them. Most of them looked pretty good. Even as late as the 1950's Studebaker, Nash, and American Motors would have looked pretty great. You would have no way of knowing Ford, GM, and Chrysler would have been the survivors and good investments.

Moreover, you don't remember it, but in the late 90's Apple was totally on life support. I think it was either Microsoft or Bill Gates tossed them some help, it was so bad. Steve Jobs came back and turned the whole mess around. If your dad had invested in them in 1986, he'd have sold it within 10 years and been happy to have walked away with more than $0.

Moreover #2, the late 90's was the tech boom. Look up some info on Pets.com. Yahoo was the internet titan. AOL was everywhere and bought Time Warner. Dell Computers were huge. Compuserve. The 90's was the same thing as cars in the early 1900's. You had no way of knowing out of all the tech companies that Amazon and Google were going to be the survivors.

You know how Amazon basically used the internet to eat Sears' lunch? That means smart and connected people fully immersed in the retail industry running the biggest retail business in the world and able to afford all the consultants and research they could want couldn't even comprehend what technology was going to do within a decade or two or spot what was going to be their downfall and you think you could have managed to pick Amazon out of all the tech companies at the same time?

Moreover #3, the places where there are spectacular opportunities, they occur to people around the founder and early employees and people in the venture capital industry. You'd had to have known Mark Zuckerberg in college or his parents and been able to lend a nerd with a computer $50k, or been an early employee of a "shaky" at best company. That's the risk you run if you go to work for a startup. If you have claim to a percent or two, if the company takes off, that's huge. But way more likely the company probably flops or gets bought out for a modest amount. Are you friends with college tech nerds? Are they working on stuff that you think giving them $10k's wouldn't be throwing money away? Do your relatives know their relatives? Are you in an area where you'd come into contact with those people?

Additionally, I'm 32. Part of getting older is realizing you've made choices and decisions and they create opportunities and paths and take away other opportunities and paths, and learning how to cope with seeing that you should have done something differently. We're all doing the best we can at the time. If any of our parents had bought $10k or 20k worth of Apple or Microsoft in the 90's they'd be millionaires by now. If my parents had bought a different house on a lake in the same town for a slightly higher price 30 years ago, they'd be in significantly different financial position too. If only my grandfather had bought large amounts of land near where he lived Washington DC during the Great Depression! You made the best decisions at the time, don't live life looking in the rear view mirror and second guessing yourself.

Looking at my situation, I could buy a flashy car that I like and would enjoy a lot or I could take that few hundred per month and invest it. What happens when I'm 60 and have an account with a big number in it? Then I buy the car I'd enjoy having and go on a lot of vacations, except I'll be old. And I don't expect suddenly when I'm older, my feelings will switch around and I'd suddenly start to enjoy spending money and seeing the number go down rather than saving it. And I've talked to my coworkers, a decade ago there was a person in the office where I work now was mid-50's and came down with brain cancer and was rapidly gone. We have other coworkers who die right after retiring, or aren't healthy enough to get much enjoyment. Think about that--you or me could spend our whole working lives saving money for retirement and then die in our 50's or right after retiring and not being able to get any enjoyment from it. And it's not just dying, but coming down with an illness or having a lot of pain. That isn't a very enjoyable life.

And yet I'd rather save money and push that problem out of what to do with it. This is what I think about when I think about whether to get rid of my cheap, working, boring car and consider getting something fun.

I think autonomous vehicles will be a large source of growth in the coming decade. So which company do you think will do it first? Ford, GM, Chrysler, or Tesla? What if Apple or Google or Uber or Yahoo or some company you haven't heard of right now swoops in and does it first? Surprise! You chose wrong. You could redeem yourself if you invested in a car company the tech company chooses to partner with because they know how to tech but not to make cars. Which car company would they partner with? Is it the one you chose?

Healthcare is big. It's 17% of our economy. How do you invest in that for 10 years for now? What if the people start electing progressives and they completely rearrange the healthcare system and do something like eliminate the need for insurance companies or sharply reduce the profitability of pharmaceutical companies?

Don't dwell on hindsighting yourself. If you look at any graph of a stock or anything it is sooooo obvious to spot the times to buy or sell and pick an optimum path through different investments but when you have to do it live you never know what is going to happen. If you had $10k now, do you think you'd invest it right now or do you think we're on the cusp of a recession where if you hang on to that sum for part of a year or more, you can get a much larger return? What do you think, hmm? It'll be so easy to be able to see what you should have done when you're 32 in 2029 and pull up a graph of stocks and what they did in 2019-20.

I don't want to be rude but stop it with the crypto. You know how gambling works because it exploits people who have the inclination in them to say 'just one more for sure!' even with games where the odds are actually pretty low to ever come out ahead. The fear of missing out is what compels people to get involved with it. People who say "If I had put $100 into bitcoin in 2011, I'd have $10 billion now!" like, no. It's exploiting the people like you who want to look at the graph of Apple's stock price and say "if I had bought in '86...". Also last week the Fed announced it's working on developing a peer to peer live payment system--you know one that will use real actual money so actual real people will be able to use it. That is going to diminish the real world use crypto claims to have. Canada already has a system like this and I don't know if European countries do as well.

Read this book, pup.

Basically monthly I buy the S&P 500 index. It's a trade off between how much return I want and how much effort I want to put in. I doubt I'll beat skyscrapers of people with PhD's who are experts in this, know accounting, read boring reports and do all sorts of research, and actually talk directly to the people running companies so I buy the index and won't ever be worse than the market as a whole--which the skyscrapers of people can't consistently beat. I own some other company's stocks separately, like a railroad, an industrial conglomerate, and Google and all three of those have done great. In that book I linked to, a section talks about how you can approximate the market performance with like owning any 25-30 random companies' stocks--because he's from a time before there were actual market indexes you can hold. Lately I've been starting to think that you can probably beat the market if you avoid the obvious loser or stagnant companies that are big enough to be part of the S&P 500. Like just buying and holding blue chips like McDonald's or Coke or IBM or Disney for multiple years will probably beat the S&P 500. You won't get rich enough to be able to retire at 35 that way, something like what Apple did, but you'll come out pretty solid in the long run. At the same time, so like I own say $10k of Google. If the company doubles, now I have $20k. Big whoop. Now I can retire. If the company 10x, I'll have $100k. That's even better but I still can't retire from that. The big companies can't grow so much--how would Google or Apple double in size from where they are now? Apple would have to completely invent a whole new industry again (and it'd have to be like actual AI or something nutty like teleportation). And if any one knew what that was going to be, they'd have done it already. We have RFID tags now and have had them for over 10 years yet stores still would rather pay cashiers than have customers simply walk through an RFID detector.

The next stuff to come is going to be connected with faster internet and reducing labor. Drones and getting rid of human drivers? E-doctor video visits?

by honza17   2019-11-17

I have similar plans. I started with learning everything about Forex, even opened live account for access to educational materials, videos (really good broker), but never have traded finally on the live account. Anyway, I practice TA daily, at least to know what to do when Stellar moons again :) And maybe later, with very small amount (on SDEX, this is awesome, you are not any limited with minimal order size, as you are on all standard exchanges; I don't consider margin trading in crypto at all, the market is not stable enough and it would be too risky) I would like also to start trading - I would really highlight the importance of the money management here (never risk more than 1.5-3% of your balance per trade, etc.). To take the similar approach as you would play a roulette in Las Vegas. Do your best to play as long as possible with the balance you can loose. And then repeat, until you learn it well and find your strategy. I expect it's a very hard and difficult way to become a real trader, and not only a gambler.

Anyway, that's what you all know probably, it's written almost everywhere at the beginning , just placed for sure :) And if not, than you have better chance than me that you won't over study the topic. It's much harder to start trading then :)

However, there's also another approach how to earn some money. And it works much better for most of the people (considering the fact that 95% of traders lost). I really recommend to read this book, it gives you another perspective:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661?tag=duc08-21

I am not telling to invest into stocks and obligates - there are no easy money and I think I better understand crypto than stocks. I believe the approach can be similar with crypto and fiat (when crypto goes down, fiat is stable similarly as obligates and you can use it to DCA cheaper crypto, as you would use the obligates to buy cheaper stocks - you are still in the market even for long-term investing - really nice approach, details in the book...).

by auser24   2019-11-17
  • Impostos: Leia o FAQ na wiki desse sub. tl;dr só declara no final do ano, no seu caso
  • Livros: Idem. Pessoalmente estou lendo esse, aqui um excerto.
by latinilv   2019-11-17

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing

by DirectorCurator   2019-08-24

How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go? Buffett himself would recommend you index. But, if you must, start with Ben Graham and move on to learning accounting and then start with Buffett's annual letters.

by vstky   2019-08-24
  • The Little Book of Common Sense Investing - Jack Bogle. He explain why just buy and hold a low cost index fund (like SPY) is the way to go.
  • The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham. The Bible of Stock Picking. Unfortunately, less than 1% can beat the market long term doing that.
  • The Single Best Investment - Lowell Miller. Good if you thing is income.
  • Dual Momentum Investing - Gary Antonnacci. A really good improvement of Jack Bogle's thesis of investing only in index funds.
by shantmelikian   2019-07-21

Just look at the right side of r/weedstocks forum... if you scroll down enough you will see these :

GUIDES AND MARKET RESOURCES

  • A Beginner's Guide to Investing
  • The Intelligent Investor
  • Investopedia

You can start there.

Plus you can search content on this sub for new investors. A lot of people are nice enough and try to help new investors. Only bit of advice I can give you is do not FOMO (Fear of missing out). Always do your own DD (Due diligence) before investing. Take peoples advice with a grain of salt.

by SovArya   2019-07-21

yes, yes. you can check pse.com.ph for more info - and or the bank you frequently use. :)

​

for more information on basic stocks - read intelligent investor by benjamin graham.

​

p.s. don't invest in things you don't know and or don't understand. and be doubtful of financial advisors. research it as if you're researching how not to get pregnant, if you're a virgin, and about to have sex (meaning take it seriously) :)

​

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

​

you can get a copy in national book store or any major book store in ph :)

by bbqbot   2019-07-21

Go read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor for everything you need to know about value investing. Buffet claims he won't ever write a book since everything is in there (also, author is the guy who Warren learned from).

Excellent book.

by Fabul0usLumin0us   2019-07-21

>90/10 stocks bonds until you're closer to retirement.

You might want to read that book too while you're at it. Keeping less than 30% bond is taking unnecessary risks.

by strolls   2019-07-21

Buy value stocks. ¯\_(ツ)_\/¯

by westurner   2019-07-12
This book probably doesn't mention that he's given away over 71% to charity since Y2K. Or that it's really cold and windy and snowy in Omaha; which makes for lots of reading time.

"Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements: The Search for the Company with a Durable Competitive Advantage" (2008) [1], "Buffetology" (1999) [2], and "The Intelligent Investor" (1949, 2009) [3] are more investment-strategy-focused texts.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Interpretation-Finan...

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Buffettology-Previously-Unexplained...

[3] https://smile.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Inv...

Value Investing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_investing https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/valueinvesting.asp

by doverthere   2019-01-13

Read: The Intelligent Investor . It's one of the best books you can read if you're interested in investing.

Investopedia university has plenty of great articles to read. Investopedia also has a stock simulator which you can use to practice with fake money.

Then go listen to some podcasts related to stock markets. Motley Fool Answers is a good podcast with some good financial advice and their mailbag episodes are helpful. There's plenty out there

by BeatElite   2019-01-13

The last Willey "for dummies" series I got was the how to land an IT job one and most of them were easy to read and had some decent pointers. That being said I'm always skeptical on getting stock market books. I own The intelligent investor and also have listened to Money Management Skills on the great courses audible series and I can say that phrase I keep hearing the most is that "you can't beat the market".

The average person who goes on etrade or Robin hood doesn't have the same resources as those higher up do with computers that can process hundreds of trades in the blink of an eye or potential insider sources . We also get emotional over stocks and find it hard to disassociate ourselves from our losses and boast about our gains. Getting someone else to manage your portfolio is also costly and you can most likely get better gains as long as you diversify your stocks in a mutual index fund. That's just a bit of what I learned and I suggest getting those 2 books/audiobooks that I recommend. I still believe the dummies books will be good, but from what I read, you'll have much more stress trying to maximize gains individually actively rather than take a backseat in a well diversified portfolio

by indexinvestoreu   2019-01-13

I would recommend against buying individual stocks for any non-sophisticated investors. There is wide research that shows that most active investors can't consistently get good returns on individual stocks. The bogleheads wiki elaborates on this topic (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_philosophy)

If you do wish to invest in individual stocks I think you may need to devote time to do thorough research on your investments. I seriously don't think some stocks recommendations on reddit are going to be very useful. The learnings of the Intelligent Investor ([https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/0060555661) ) are a good start.

​

by firstreminder   2018-11-10

Easiest thing you could do is put as much as you can into the Vanguard 2065 retirement fund and max out retirement accounts. Best thing would be to pick safe companies, pay attention read their proxy statements and vote sensibly, not giving the board whatever they suggest. This is the downside of index funds, which agree with the board over 90% of the time because they have too many positions to track.

Books:

by ShrinknShrivel   2018-11-10

The best advice I can think of is for you to start here: https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/0060555661

by NorthSuperior   2018-11-10

https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/0060555661