Peter Drucker, the management guru, said, “This is by far the best book on investment policy and management.” The more I read books on investing, the more I get convinced that investing is much simpler than most people think or are told. Simple, but not easy as Buffett had once said. Most of what one … Read more
Seth Klarman is the founder and president of The Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investment partnership. He wrote a book named ‘Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor’ which is an investment classic, but has been out of print since 1991. If you google for this book, you will find a … Read more
I read a book titled “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking” over the weekend. It is about the unconscious, intuitive power of our mind in making decisions in a flash. Something that can work both ways – good and bad – depending on the situation; and how to harness its power, as well as … Read more
A couple of days back I was reading “Dilbert and The Way of the Weasels”. While this is a funny book, a small section has some amazing insight quietly embedded. In that book, the author claims, perhaps jokingly, that everything that a person really needs to know about personal finance and investing can be summarized … Read more
“What is here is found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.” – Mahabharata With these words from the epic, Gurcharan Das starts the prelude to his book “The Difficulty of Being Good”, which I had the opportunity to read over the past few days. An output from what he terms as his ‘academic holiday’, … Read more
Another weekend another book. This time it was about irrationality and actually how it helps being irrational – The Upside of Irrationality! We are an irrational species, and that was amply demonstrated through a set of experiments that the author conducted over time. Irrationality One of our irrationalities has to do with lack of acceptance … Read more
I recently finished reading ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese essayist, writer, philosopher. I had read his ‘Fooled by Randomness’ a few years back, and the essential message of this book is, more or less, similar. The basic premise of both the books is this: The … Read more
Again continuing on Benjamin Graham, this weekend I was privileged to have read a book by this title “Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession”. It is a collection of rare writings by and interviews with one of financial history’s most brilliant visionaries. The book presents Graham’s evolution of ideas on security analysis spanning five decades. Particularly … Read more
Over the past few days, I was privileged to have read another masterpiece of a book – “Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits” by the legendary investor Philip Fisher – the father of growth investing. A complete opposite of Graham and the theory of value investment, Fisher proposes a set of 15 ‘scuttlebutt’ principles that work … Read more