Books
Here's a list of my favorite investment books, it used to be a lot longer than it is now but I decided to slim it down and only include those books that truly had a big impact upon me. I haven't bothered including 'The Intelligent Investor' and 'Security Analysis' as you probably already own them if you've decided to visit my website.
'One up on Wall Street' by Peter Lynch
This is the first investing book I ever read and it is still one of my favorites, when I first read it I didn't even know what a P/E ratio was and barely knew anything about stocks or investing. Lynch laid it all out plain and simple, what a stock was and the different types (fast growers, cyclicals, stalwarts etc). How to research a company and how to think about the market. My key takeaways from this book are that the individual investor can develop an edge if they focus on companies or industries that they know something about or can find before Wall Street discovers them. He also drills it into you that your investment thesis should be painful simple and you should stick with a stock so long as the story doesn't change. Every time I re-read it I learn something new. Lynch's other book 'Beating the Street' is also great and worth picking up.
'You can be a Stock Market Genius' by Joel Greenblatt
Like everyone else seems to say, awful title and great book. Greenblatt explains a whole bunch of special situations to the reader and provides real world case studies to back them up. He covers stuff like spin-offs, tenders, rights offerings etc. My key takeaways from this book are that opportunities are everywhere, you just have to put in a little work and you'll find them. The other thing that stuck me was how simple most of the ideas were without any fancy math being required to figure them out. Greenblatt stresses finding situations where there is some change afoot that hasn't yet been noticed, this sort of time arbitrage exists far more abundantly in the nano-cap world.
'How to Make the Stock Market Make Money for You' by Ted Warren
This one was recommended to me by my favorite stock blogger and is the best investing book I've ever read by a country mile. If you think studying stock charts is superstitious nonsense you will likely not like this book at all. It clicked with me right away when I read it just like when I read about Ben Graham's core concepts of 'Intrinsic value' and 'Margin of safety'. Warren advises his readers to study long range stock charts to select favorable entry and exit points, he also asserts that the stock markets and individual stocks are subject to manipulation by various unnamed financial interests and that you should profit by observing their actions rather than lose by being unwittingly subject to them. If I had to throw away all my investing books apart from one this is the one I'd keep.
'Finding Winners Among Depressed and Low-Priced Stocks' by Richard L. Evans
This one is another charting book that was recommended to me along with the Ted Warren book. The author stresses the importance of studying stock charts to find out of favor stocks which provide the greatest upside potential. The book is easy to read and the concepts are very simple to grasp, look at trends, support, resistance, volume and price action and use them to your advantage when selecting stock candidates. Evans also discusses the seasonality of the stock market including the 'January effect'. I'm constantly going back to this book to pound the concepts into my head.
'There's Always Something To Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach' by Christopher Risso-Gill
This book is all about the late great Canadian value investor Peter Cundill who deserves to be more well known considering his magnificent performance of 15.2% CAGR over 33 years. The thing I love about this book is that it is based on Peter's investment journals and so you get a deep insight into how he thought about and approached investing, he focused primarily on assets rather than earnings which is something I also like to do having been influenced by Ben Graham and Walter Schloss.
'Deep Value Investing: Finding Bargain Shares With Big Potential' by Jeroen Bos
I loved this one as the book is essentially a series of real life case studies of the deep value approach applied in the UK stock market. Jeroen Bos is a protege of the late great Peter Cundill and is very much influenced by Ben Graham and Walter Schloss too. As such he is most interested in the balance sheet with a particular penchant for net-net stocks, namely those stocks which are trading below net current asset value or some other approximation of liquidation value. Investing is much more practice than theory so this book hits the spot.
'How I Made £2,000,000 in the Stock Market' by Nicolas Darvas
This one is really well written and was a really entertaining read. Darvas was a dancer by trade who then became interested in the stock market. After some initial failures he came to the conclusion that he should ignore hot tips from his broker and shun the influence of Wall Street. He developed his own system and set of rules which included creating what he called 'box patterns', he would study the stock prices and movement of a small group of stocks and buy and sell them as they moved from one to another of his designated boxes. He focused his attention on liquid issues so he could move in and out of them easily and employed margin and trailing stop losses. Darvas was essentially using support and resistance to time his buys and sells and his name lives on today with technical analysis practitioners still using 'Darvas boxes'.
Cycles: The Science of Prediction by Prof Edward Dewey
Long before I got into stock investing I became interested in Cycle theory. I find it endlessly fascinating that cycles appear everywhere in nature and are present in such things as warfare, solar activity, building activity, commodities prices and interest rates to name but a few. Prof Dewey was tasked with finding the cause of the Great Depression by President Hoover, after interviewing a series of economists who all gave different answers he set about finding out for himself, and his investigation led him to the discovery that there are numerous cycles running through economic and business life. This book presents and discusses numerous cycles of varying length and details how they permeate nature, economics and business.