What Would Ben Graham Do Now?

 by Jeffrey Towson

The title of this book suggests that the investment strategy of the late Benjamin Graham can be slightly tweaked and the applied to make profitable investment in the risk-laden, wild swinging investment environment of right now 2011. The author is an international investment consultant with considerable and wide-ranging international experience, so I would expect he would know how value investing should work in various political and foreign climates. Unfortunately, instead of channeling Ben Graham in a modern, international  light, all Mr. Towson really does in this book is tell us that we are investing in a politically charged, international environment (which we know already, because that’s what he tells us early in his book). This fact, says Towson, makes some investments marginal bets, and some marginal bets bad ones. What it all boils down to is, you need to invest in the same kind of value and growth companies, but also compensate for political instability, foreign policies, cultural anomalies, and the like. There are plenty of anecdotes to back up the author’s opinions, and that’s all well and good, but I didn’t see much discussion about what Mr. Graham might actually do, much less why he would. In fact, as I got to the middle of the book (where I stopped reading), the author would go on for ten or twenty pages without so much as mentioning Mr. Graham. Personally, I don’t care enough about Russian politics, Chinese cronyism, Middle-Eastern cultural mores and their slanted perceptions of the west to really apply anything in this book to investing. Of course, there really aren’t any strategies, analysis, methodologies, and or other investing advice and tips to apply anyways. So, I still don’t know what Ben Graham would do now, but I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to put this aside and read Benjamin Graham and the Power of Growth Stocks (which really does channel Ben Graham and is a much better read).