Stocks for the Long Run

by Jeremy Siegel

The fifth edition of Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run, features great updates written in light of recent economic events, i.e. important stuff that happened long after the publication of this book. That is why after 20 years, it remains required reading for stock investors of all ilks, and its value continues to grow through the years. With Mr. Siegel’s penchant for being a scholar and purveyor of insight and current knowledge, he expertly extends his previous work to cover the real estate implosion, the 2008 depression, the post-depression recovery, and the Fed’s tight money policy and quantitative easing. Everything that the press and TV financial gurus have worked so hard to obfuscate over the last six years suddenly becomes lucid and, if not sensible, at least explainable.

Of course, the majority of the book is the original classic, where Mr. Siegel displays considerable acumen and gobs of statistics and applies them to markets and investments. Although this is my first time reading this book, I’ve had some exposure over the years to Mr. Siegel’s writing in economic magazines and newspapers. He is always one of the most lucid financial pundits around, a skill that was obviously honed in the writing (and rewriting) of this book over the last two decades. He uses clear examples, easy to understand graphs and tables, and an overall “no nonsense” tone that keeps the book light but “sturdy”. And instead of telling potential investors what they should do, he tells you what to expect when it comes to markets, individual stocks, and particular sectors, how to recognize what they are doing, and what you might want to consider doing to take advantage of that. If none of that suits you, all you have to do is skip to the next chapter, where he will give you different insight into a different investment aspect. Mr. Siegel covers everything stocks, so someone looking for detailed information can read individual sections to their taste, while someone looking for a thorough overview can just go through the book, cover to cover.

This is one of the best books ever written on investing in stocks, a book that other pros, authors, and analysts keep on their shelf for a ready reference. If you’re serious about investing in stocks, you need to keep a copy of this five dollar-sign book on your shelf as well.

Keynes's Way to Wealth

by John F. Wasik

This is the first book about John Maynard Keynes that I’ve ever read. Of course I’ve heard lots about Keynes and his economic theories, so I was intrigued at the idea of utilizing his ideas to gain wealth, but that is where this book falls short. It attempts to show the man and his ideas in light of modern investment theory, but I felt that overall, it is caught in between a biography and a “how to” manual, and ultimately doesn’t tell us much about Keynes or how to become wealthy.

Biographically, this book provides only a bare sketch of the type of man Keynes was and his personal history. It tries to angle all this into an overview of how it led Mr. Keynes to develop his investment strategies (not his economic theories), but the conclusions drawn and supporting facts are tenuous at best. There are detailed sections of stocks that he bought, many (naturally) of companies that no longer exist or have long since been bought out or merged into other firms. Because (let’s face it) it would have been irrelevant information anyway, dates, prices and quantities of stocks purchased and sold, and individual profit and loss figures, are largely absent. This means that the reader is given a glimpse into Keynes’ investment strategies without regard to anything that might be made use of. Where the book excels is in providing a number of sidebars that supply definitions of investment terms and explanations of some of the situations that Keynes had to deal with, and these are interesting and sometimes, valuable. They won’t be particularly useful for advanced investors, but they will make this book much more approachable for beginners.

In the end, I think the reader must keep in mind that Mr. Keynes made money investing during historic depressions and devastating wars, so not only does that merit study, the ideas behind such investment strategies can probably still be applied today. Mr. Masik has made a good start looking into Keynes’s investment strategy, but in the end, I feel there is more meat on the bone than this book offers, which is why I rank it just above average at three and a half dollar signs.

Win by Not Losing

by Nicholas Atkeson and Andrew Houghton

I’ve noticed a theme running through a lot of investment books lately, and that theme is: reducing risk in an investment portfolio does not necessarily mean that you will thereby be reducing gains. Of course, greater risk can lead to greater gains. It can also lead to unmitigated disaster. That’s why I like the middle ground that is advocated by Atkeson and Houghton: try to maximize the upside, sure, but by all means, minimize the downside at all costs.

The authors’ argument is that there are ways to predict when the market is inflated and stocks are overpriced, or at least, not good value. That’s when a smart investor will want to start hedging or selling, or at least not be in buying mode. They relate a number of real world stories of real world investors who prove their points. They then present data to support their points further, and they even give you a concrete plan for executing intelligent investments based on their ideas. If that isn’t enough, they have a website that provides more information on executing their methodologies.

Some of the other books I have read (and reviewed in this blog) that encourage a similar approach including Winning the Lower’s Game, Asset Allocation, and Risk-Return Analysis. This book more than rounds those out to make a fine quartet of books for investors, both those starting out and not wanting to get fleeced, and those who are farther along (like myself), who still need a certain level of income but can’t afford another year like 2008.

Asset Allocation and Risk-Return Analysis

 

 by Roger C. Gibson

by Harry Markowitz

I decided to review these books together because the subject matter is quite similar, yet the approaches of the two authors couldn't be more different. Harry Markowitz is a Nobel Prize winner who more or less defined the concept of risk in investments and how to weigh it in the construction of a portfolio.  Roger Gibson, on the other hand, is a financial adviser with many years of experience and a unique view on balancing a portfolio to limit risk and maximize profit. Both advocate asset class and securities mixes that lead to portfolio diversification and limit risk. Markowitz does it with lengthy examples and complex formulas. Gibson does it with hypothetical portfolios and performance evaluation of investment classes.

Markowitz’s book, which is the first of four volumes on this ostensibly deep subject, is much like a college textbook. The financial jargon is at times a slog, and the formulas are nearly incomprehensible without an advanced mathematics degree. The parts that can be understood by the typical layman (like me), however, are interesting and useful. They make it very possible to analyze one’s own portfolio in the light of Markowitz’s experience and research, and that should lead to risk minimizing, return maximizing portfolio.

Gibson’s book does not suffer from the academic bent that afflicts Markowitz’s book, but it does have the drawback of being partially directed toward financial planners and investment advisers.  He shows historical trends and their effect on hypothetical portfolios, and then strengthens his argument with critical analysis of the performance of various asset classes during up, down, and sideways markets. The heart of his strategy ends up being diversification, rebalancing, and risk avoidance which individual investors and investment advisers can put to work in their personal and client portfolios. He then spends the last third of the book explaining how an investment adviser can analyze a client’s risk tolerance and use the principals contained in the book to build a suitable portfolio. Some people will find this interesting and useful, but as a long time investor who is not a CFA or investment adviser, I found it to be not that useful.

Risk-return analysis and risk avoidance are important cornerstones of any investment strategy, which is what makes these books so important. Without the benefit of the other three volumes of Markowitz’s work, and not needing the investment adviser sections of Gibson’s work, it’s hard to give them full marks for their books, but the material that is pertinent and understandable is so valuable, that a four-and-a-half dollar mark for each is more than justifiable.

Standard and Poor's 500 Guide 2013

Saving some time, here's the review I posted to Amazon a while back:

Back in the 80’s and 90’s when I was an economic development consultant in Japan, the Shikiho listing of company data was the go to source for information about companies in general. We used it to identify companies likely to perform strongly in the near future, and therefore likely to invest overseas, too. Obviously though, it also proved useful for identifying companies that might be good prospects in which to invest in general.

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Guide provides a lot of information that is very reminiscent of the Shikiho. I felt vaguely nostalgic flipping through the company explanations and financial summaries, reviewing the year to year performance of the stock price, P&L summary statements, earnings, dividend statements, and all the rest . The information contained in this book is very thorough and useful to a point. In this day and age, however, the Internet provides a number of resources to get more reliable and up to date information that would probably be of more value to most investors. Although it does provide buy, sell and hold recommendations, because this is Standard and Poor’s book of all 500 companies contained in their exchange, it does not offer much in the way of in depth analysis, but as a source of raw data for performing your own analysis, it is invaluable. You’ll just need to be prepared to provide your own investment strategy.

I’m very glad the publisher provided me a copy of this book gratis for this review, but I would say, the information contained is well worth the retail price. I rate this book as a “buy”.

Winning the Loser's Game

by Charles D. Ellis

The original title for my review of this book was: “Deep thinking, shallow strategy”. After I thought about it for a while, I realized that the deep thinking part was right, but that calling this book’s strategy “shallow” was probably not correct. “Boring”? Maybe. “Plain”? Definitely. But “shallow”? Probably not. See, the only strategy that this book propounds is buying index funds. That’s it. The plain white toast of the investment world is this book’s simple strategy for winning the loser’s game, and the author trots out lots of heavyweight facts and figures in chapter after chapter, with the bottom line of: you could have done this, and it might have made you rich, or it might not have, but if you had indexed, you’d be doing okay.

With such a simple concept driving the book, the author somewhat hedges his bet by spending time and pages convincing the readers that investing is a loser’s game and always will be. You may believe that, or you may not, but you’ll find the author’s view compelling if you read the entire book. More active investors lose money than make money. People get cheated. People make bad, poorly researched, and outright rash investment decisions. The only way to win that game is not to play it that way, and index funds are ideal for playing it the right way. Will your investments go up? Maybe, but you’ll never do much worse (or much better) than the rest of the market. Maybe you don’t want to be Joe Average, but I for one don’t want to be Joe Below-average.

I’m a longtime index investor and I’ve done okay. For me, this book was a lot of “preaching to the choir”, but I still enjoyed it. The book is well written, well organized, well thought out, and I’ll say it again, compelling. Some readers may balk at a whole book about an idea as simple as “buy index funds”, but maybe that’s what it takes to convince you. I recommend this book to anyone who invests in their future. It can’t hurt you as an investor, and it might help make you a better (if slightly stodgy) one.

Born to Blog

by Mark W. Schaeffer and Stanford A. Smith

I thought this book would be a little bit more about how to take a blog and turn it into something profitable, rather than being just a book about setting up a blog to profit from. Not that that isn't a good idea, it’s just not as easy as everyone thinks, with or without a book written by two successful (I presume) bloggers. This book is, however, very informative and useful. It’s a kind of “brass tacks” guide that will be most useful to people who are already blogging, but probably of less utility to someone looking to set up a blog for the first time. This book does cover the basics, however, and it does a good job of it. It seems to be always steering the reader toward monetization, so that if you are just blogging for the hell of it or to have fun, the constant reminders of what might be “profitable” can be a bit cumbersome. (At least, those suggestions and tidbits weren't of much practical use to me.) The book is laid out quite smartly, though, and has great sections on side bar content and which blog sites to consider and which to avoid. The authors have a lot of experience, not only in blogging, but also in the periphery of blogging, and they share a lot of their insights in interesting, real world anecdotes. I think as long as you keep in mind that blogging can be hard work when you are doing it for reasons other than sheer enjoyment and that only a small fraction of the world’s blogs ever make enough money to support their authors, this book will help you swim upstream faster and get your thoughts and interests published online with a minimum of frustration and anxiety. That’s more than reason enough to give it four dollar marks.