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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One stop shop for stock investing strategy and creating investing philosphy by learning from the investing legends, April 10, 2009
John Reese's book "The Guru Investor - How to beat the market using history's best investment strategies" fills the gap in investing books on how a person who doesn't have a stock investing background (and struggles for some time with it) create a strategy to beat the market (and have a chance to beat the market) by learning from those who have beat the market consistently in the past. The book covers important most of the basic financial metrics and also covers value, growth and quants strategy. This book is basic enough and easy to understand. This book can be a one stop shop for investing books if you already know the basic of stock investing, but if you don't know much about stock market or how stock investing works, then this is not the book that you want to read first.
The 6 principles of "Guru Investing" (what I personally called investing philosophy):
1. Combining strategies to minimize risk and maximize returns
2. Stick to the numbers or the market will stick it to you
3. Stay disciplined over the long haul
4. Diversify, but you can't beat the market by owning it
5. Size and style - focused systems only limit investment possibilities
6. You don't have to hold stocks for the long term to be a long term investor
Pros:
1. practical and succinct
2. covers most of the investing legends strategies and their "story" (Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch, David Dreman, Ken Fisher etc)
3. Covers many important financial ratios
4. Covers in depth the topic of "Determining when to sell"
5. Relate to the audience well (as someone who is trying to learn about investing from the investing greats)
6. Includes interesting facts in the fact box (or key learning) for each chapter or for each important topic.
7. Covers the performance of "Guru" based stock model portfolio and yearly track record comparison
Cons:
1. Marketing (cross selling) their other investment service (validea dot com and Validea investing system)
2. Supporting a subjective topic of the drawback of market timing/short term trading (that "one have to be right at least 74% of the time to make money with market timing approach")
3. Should include more learning/strategies from Philip Fisher
In conclusion, "The Guru Investor - How to beat the market using history's best investment strategies", is a very good resource to help us understand many of the proven stock investing strategies (as applied by several of the investing legend). This book is a nice hybrid of "the intelligent investor" type book (theory concentrated) and "One up on Wall Street" (practical and experience) type book.
Happy Investing,
Sidarta Tanu
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learn how to invest from the Gurus, March 8, 2009
This review is from: The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History's Best Investment Strategies (Kindle Edition)
This is simply one of the best investment books on the market. Who better to learn from than the greatest investors in history? What better strategies can you use than the ones used by Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Ken Fisher, Martin Zwieg or Peter Lynch? What this book does is review the lives and investing performance of the top ten investors who ever lived. Then the book presents how to invest like them using the same metrics and valuations that the gurus used based on their own books or from writings from people who have studied the gurus. The author has used model portfolios based on the techniques in the book to show that these approaches continued to work from 2003 to 2008 with most of them doubling and tripling the performance of the S&P 500 over that time.
The book will give you the knowledge you need to pick stocks using stock screeners based on price to sales ratios, price to earnings ratios, book value, liquidity, earnings growth, and many other metrics you will learn from the gurus. There is also a free companion web site that gives three stocks for each guru that currently meet their guidelines. The book recommends sticking with a strategy for the long run to really get results. It also explains the need to balance your portfolio at regular intervals, and sell stocks when the fundamentals have changed or they get involved in an accounting or other scandal. Excellent book for getting started in investing or for improving your investing performance.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Book Review from the Aleph Blog, January 23, 2010
John Reese and I share something in common: we both once wrote for RealMoney.com. Occasionally I would question him in the CC about what he wrote, but I never got an answer back. He was probably a busy man.
Well, now I get to review his book, and I have to say that I like it. It won't be one of my favorite investment books, but it embeds many good ideas that will be useful to average investors. Here are some of the main advantages:
1) It points people toward strategies that are valuation-conscious. Whether investing for growth or value, the best investors pay attention to valuation.
2) Valuation is not everything. Earnings growth and price momentum also are valuable to follow.
3) Quality of the balance sheet matters.
One of the things that I like to say to investors is find something that fits your character, your free time, and your time horizon. This book simplifies the strategies of ten clever investors. Some require more time and effort, some less. With ten good strategies to choose from, perhaps one will fit your situation well.
For the ten gurus, it describes them, their strategies, and how to implement them in a simplified way. I knew a little about all of the gurus before reading the book, but I learned a little bit new about each one, except Buffett. They made life choices that led them to their investment theories, and the book makes that connection.
Sell Discipline
The sell disciplines in the book are similar to mine -- rebalancing, and adding stocks that the model likes better, and removing those that rank lower. For fundamental investors, that's a reasonable way of limiting risk, assuming that you review your thesis before adding new money.
Quibbles
1) Earnings quality: leaving aside Piotorski, the rest of the gurus spend little time on earnings quality. Particularly for value investors this component is critical for avoiding mistakes.
2) What Reese puts forth is a simplified version of what most of these great investors do. The actual process is more complex, and requires business judgment. That said, his simplifed versions have done better than the market, in general.
3) Performance calculations cut off in July 2008. Now, he had to cut off somewhere, or he couldn't publish. Still, it would be interesting to know how the strategies did July 2008 through February 2009 -- how did they do at risk control?
4) To be able to use this book effectively, you would need to have access to some reasonably sophisticated stock screening software. The cheapest one that I know of would come from AAII, but you would also have to be an AAII member to buy it. (If anyone knows a better one at a cheaper price, let me know.)
Who Would Benefit From this Book
This book would work best for people who want to follow valuation-conscious strategies, and not spend a ton of time at it, if they are willing to put in some time at the beginning setting up stock screens.
Summary
If after you have read this, you want to buy the book, you can buy it here -- The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History's Best Investment Strategies.
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