PDF The Intelligent Investor Rev Ed Collins Business Essentials eBook Benjamin Graham Jason Zweig Warren E Buffett

Product details File Size 46749 KB Print Length 640 pages Publisher HarperCollins e-books; Revised, Subsequent edition (March 17, 2009) Publication Date March 17, 2009 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B000FC12C8

The Intelligent Investor Rev Ed Collins Business Essentials eBook Benjamin Graham Jason Zweig Warren E Buffett Reviews

• Edition I found commentary very useful (though often distracting). If you are not a professional - you'll appreciate the commentaries and epilogue - read it first? It's very inspiring.
  
  Book "You either get the idea in the first five minutes, or you don't get it at all", commented Warren Buffet in the epilogue. I would add - you don't necessarily need to read all 550 pages, but you must read through the idea of value investing - and it will change your way of looking at the world. I always felt confused and amazed by listening to all the ridiculous fuzz that comes from the Wall Street through TV and the internet. The book explains why.
  
  Several rules of thumbs I noted into my keep
  - Investor buys the business [based on its price/value], speculator buys the stock [based on an absurd believe that he can foresee where the stock price will go].
  - The best way to earn adequate return without any trouble whatsoever is to invest into cheap (low maintenance cost) indexes; use dollar averaging (buy every month instead of once at a random point of time) for smoothing the luck involved.
  - For enterprising investor (willing to spend much more time), look for a diversified list of bargain issues (at least 30 issues, business values (i.e. net current asset and other related metrics) is below market cap)
  - During the bubble, hot industries and companies are getting overpriced. That could only be financed from somewhere. Partially that money are coming from well established old economy companies that lose the appeal. Thus, invest in such old economy companies while bubble grows, as soon as the bubble burst - undervalued companies would rise back.
  - Don't ever buy IPOs! (See chapter for compelling arguments)
  - Don't consider companies that do not pay dividends. Dividends - money firm pays you for providing capital, they belong to you. They cut a piece for reinvestment - payout ratio. If firm doesn't pay dividends - invest all into growth so you could profit later - that's a speculation. Moreover stock price would be more volatile because it should now rely on future rather than current prospects.
  - When gambling - bet on a single chip to maximize the payoff (roulette $1 to $35 payoff at 1/37 chance). When investing - diversify each investment must have a margin of safety, the more diversified portfolio - the less likely that all will fail. You are a roulette house now who earns with each turn of the wheel.
• No complaints of the book itself, but the edition of it is bad. The book has a number of tables in it they are all rotated 90 degrees and in such a low resolution that they are basically just unreadable pixels.
• So far into my career, this book has un-ironically been one the greatest investments I have made so far.
  
  This is a great book for anyone who is interested in introducing themselves into the world of investing, or wants to hone their skills and better themselves. Although, while a great book I would not recommend it to anyone who doesn't have the discipline to treat this book as a college textbook. Annotate, take notes, and create a guide. If you want to start taking investing seriously and want to begin practicing the discipline of self education, this is the book for you.
  
  Best of luck to everybody.
• This probably is one of the greatest investing books ever written, but it suffers from two flaws 1) like all such books, it could be condensed into about 20 pages. The supporting evidence could be put in an appendix for those who want to see it. 2) it is very dated. I was 13 when Graham published his last edition, and I just can't get excited reading something that talks about 1970 like it was last year. The commentary by Zweig, widely criticized, is actually the saving grace. His writing style is more current and he brings things up-to-date, sort of, but even his commentary misses the Great Recession. This would all be much better if it could be taken out of its temporal context and summarized more generally. Charts that make a point using data from decades ago is okay, but the body of the book is so immersed in old dates that it just feels, well, out of date!
• In it's time, I'm sure "The Intelligent Investor" was a blockbuster success, written by one of the foremost investment geniuses of all time. I'm also sure that most of the investment fundamentals outlined in the book still apply IN THEORY, but the book is so outdated, despite revisions, that it was of no use to me. Most of the examples, charts, graphs and illustrations were limited to industrial, brick & mortar businesses of the 60's and 70's. It's an entirely different world and investment mindset today. The "defensive investment" financial guidelines listed in chapter 14 were, in this day and time, completely unrealistic. Try finding a handful of stocks with a price to book ratio of less than 1.5, or companies with a recommended current ratio (current assets / current liabilities) of at least 21. Today, most companies with financial statistics like these are not growing AT ALL. Furthermore, the book is not up-to-date enough to guide the investor through the dizzying array of valuable online stock screening/research websites that are available. The book is so outdated, the Internet is barely, if at all, even mentioned in the book, much less covered as the ultimate stock research tool of all time. I'm now retired, and I wish I had read this book in 1972 when I graduated from college, but it was of no use to me today. Sorry !