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A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Completely Revised & Updated)

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This is a classic book, first published in 1973. The 9th edition just came out this year. Every investor, whether you believe in market efficiency or not, should read this book at least once. This book does a very good job reconciling between market efficiency and perceived inefficiencies such as bubbles at different times. The author believes in a weak form of efficient market theory. Simply put, the market may not be perfectly efficient at all times, but it's efficient enough to make it very difficult and costly trying to beat it. In the end, an investor is better off holding a market index fund that invests in everything under the sun. It's not worth the cost and effort trying to find the undervalued stocks or high-growth mutual funds.

The book begins with two basic stock valuation models -- Firm Foundations and Castles in the Air. It goes on with a review of bubbles and manias throughout history, from more ancient history -- tulip craze in the Netherlands, the South Sea bubble in England, the 1929 Great Crash in the U.S. -- to the stock market anomalies from the 1960s, 1970s, all the way to the late 1990s dot com bubble. The book then introduces two basic camps of stock valuation analysis: Technical Analysis and Fundamental Analysis. It shows how both Technical Analysis and Fundamental Analysis fail to identify outstanding investment opportunities more than what an efficient market already provides. Not that you can't make money with Technical Analysis and/or Fundamental Analysis, but you can't make more money than what you already can with investing in a market index fund.

The chapter on behavioral finance is new for the 9th edition. It reviews how investors often become their own worst enemy when it comes to investing. The book "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them" (ISBN 0684859386) covers this area in more details.

The final section of this book is the practical part. It gives practical advice on insurance, tax deferred accounts, saving for college, different vehicles for cash reserves, bonds, real estate, and stock mutual funds. Finally the book lists specific portfolio and fund recommendations for people in different stages of their lives.

Overall, this is a great book, a must read for every investor. It is however a little long and it requires some patience because it explains everything in details. If you want to cut to the chase and prefer a cookbook approach, I recommend the shorter book "The Random Walk Guide to Investing" (ISBN 039332639X) by the same author. The basic premise is the same in both books. The shorter "The Random Walk Guide to Investing" condenses everything into 3 basic points and 10 rules. It is about 200 pages long. The full book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" is over 400 pages.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, 9th ed., by Burton G. Malkiel, is a classic and brilliant explanation of how investors make the same mistakes over and over again, and how you can avoid those mistakes. If you want to understand how the stock market works, and decide for yourself if you should be investing in index mutual funds or picking stocks, this book is a must-read.

This book is not short, but that's because it goes through the history of investing (starting in 1592! through the dot-com era), explains how professionals invest and modern portfolio theory, and how you can apply all that to your investment portfolio.

I read this book before I was an investment advisor, have re-read it since, and recommend it to my clients who want to understand how the stock market, and how investors, work.

Pros: Love the stories of early investment bubbles, like the tulip bulb bubble (yes, actual tulip bulbs) and how the dot-com bubble was just history repeating itself. Great explaination of modern portfolio theory, that a non-financial-geek can understand.

Cons: Still is pretty technical for some people, and no one could say the book is short or quick reading. Modern portfolio theory may not work in all asset classes (like international investments, though that may be changing).

What I have learned: I love sharing stories of all of the bubbles throughout history, when I'm at a cocktail party or networking event. Helps me explain to clients and press why the dot-com bubble happened, why indexing works (in some asset classes), and how someone should evaluate the fundamentals of a stock.

Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street is well known to be one of the modern classics on stock investing. I was already aware of the premise behind the book - the stock market is pretty efficient and most everyone is wasting their time trying to find inefficiencies to exploit - but I was interested in finding out what information inside could really help me as an individual, both as an investor and as a person interested in improving my personal finances. Here's what I found.

Chapter 1: Firm Foundations and Castles in the Air
The book starts off by defining two basic investment ideologies, the firm foundation theory and the "castle in the air" theory. The firm foundation theory basically says that you should invest based on the actual real value of what you're investing in; for example, if you buy a stock of Coke, it should be based on what the value of the Coca-Cola Corporation is. The "castle in the air" theory basically says that you should invest in response to what the crowds are doing and that you can make more money by riding the waves of people who are either following trends or trying to invest based on a firm foundation. Which one is right? The truth is that they both are, but at different times.

Chapter 2: The Madness of Crowds
This chapter is quite entertaining: it discusses financial "crazes" throughout history, including my personal favorite craze of all, tulipomania. In all three examples (tulipomania, the South Sea bubble, and the Wall Street crash of 1929), a market grew like gangbusters until everything was overvalued, then the values rapidly returned to normal. Graphs of prices in all three examples bear this out; within a year or two of the end of the craze, the prices had returned to roughly the same value as they were before the big run-up.

Chapter 3: Stock Valuation from the Sixties through the Nineties
Even more amusing, Malkiel continues this theme of markets that go crazy and then level off again by using several examples of cross-sections of the stock market where this occurred throughout the last fifty years. I was aware of the overvaluation of food stocks in the 1980s, for example, but to see that it has just repeated over and over again is an eye-opener. Take the Nifty Fifty from the early 1970s - people were basically speculating in blue chips, and by the end of the decade, the speculation had gone away and the stocks returned to normal blue chip levels.

Chapter 4: The Biggest Bubble of All: Surfing on the Internet
This all of course leads to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and the bust in the early 2000s. Malkiel basically argues that this huge bubble was the result of a confluence of the same bubbles as before, all working in concert: the IPO mania that fueled the early 1960s stock market, the "smoke and mirrors" businesses of the South Sea bubble, and the chasing of future efficiencies that happened in the 1850s with railroad stocks all happened again with the dot-com businesses. And, again, it peaked and crashed and everything returned to roughly as they were before. Coincidence? Malkiel's main point in the whole book is that it's not a coincidence. Markets are efficient and time and time again, when inefficiencies occur, it won't take long for the market to weed them out.

Chapter 5: Technical and Fundamental Analysis
Given this central idea of market efficiency that's been pounded in with dozens of examples, Malkiel moves on to look at the two most common forms of analysis that occur on Wall Street: technical analysis and fundamental analysis. Technical analysis is the study of the behavior of prices on the market, using past performance to speculate on future performance, often using complex charts and trend lines. On the other hand, fundamental analysis revolves around analyzing the health of a business by carefully dissecting its financial statements, the market the business competes in, and its competitors. This chapter mostly serves as a detailed introduction to both, though it's already clear that Malkiel has somewhat more respect for fundamental analysis than technical analysis.

Chapter 6: Technical Analysis and the Random-Walk Theory
This chapter is basically a complete decimation of technical analysis; there's no other way to really put it. Perhaps the most devastating part is when he compares the stock market to the average length of a hemline in women's fashion and finds a correlation. In other words, technical analysis spends all of its time looking for correlations - but most of these correlations are spurious at best. By spending all of your time looking at charts, you're essentially cutting yourself off from a broader picture, making the spurious correlations even worse.

Chapter 7: How Good Is Fundamental Analysis?
Malkiel has at least some respect for fundamental analysis because it is based on foundational logic and is open to accepting wide varieties of data. However, he finds fundamental analysis to be deeply flawed as well. There are many reasons why fundamental analysis can be completely off base: random events (like 9/11), dubious financial data from companies (like Enron), human failings (emotional attachments and incompetence), the loss of good analysts to better positions, and so on. Basically, Malkiel concludes that professional analysts may have a slight leg up on individual investors, but this is mostly due to having more ready access to information and other materials and the advantage is minimal.

Chapter 8: A New Walking Shoe: Modern Portfolio Theory
From there, we move on to portfolio theory, which is basically the idea that people should have a diverse selection of investments and that these investments should maximize the rewards while minimizing the risk. Malkiel basically argues that it doesn't matter how much you diversify your stocks (and other assets), you are still exposed to some risk. In general, he has some respect for modern portfolio theory, but he goes on in the next chapter to point out why minimizing risk isn't always the best strategy.

Chapter 9: Reaping Reward By Increasing Risk
This was easily the most complicated chapter in the book and left me taking some lengthy breaks in the middle to digest the information. This chapter basically takes the ideas from the previous chapter and introduces a new factor: beta. Basically, beta is a number that expresses how closely an individual stock matches the behavior of the overall stock market in the past. Thus, in theory, stocks with a high beta should jump like crazy during a bull market and then dive like Greg Louganis during a downturn. With a very wide scope, this is true, but in specifics, it rarely turns out to be highly accurate.

Chapter 10: Behavioral Finance
This chapter takes a close look at behavioral finance, which applies human cognitive and emotional biases to their investment choices and thus how these biases affect overall markets. From behavioral finance, Malkiel concludes that the only parts that really work are the ones that are common sense: don't invest long term in what's hot right now, don't overtrade, and only sell stocks that are losers.

Chapter 11: Potshots at the Efficient-Market Theory and Why They Miss
Here, Malkiel walks through a series of criticisms of the overall idea of the book, which is that the market is generally very efficient and always reverts to the mean. He starts off by discarding some poor arguments and gradually moves onto better and better arguments, ending with evaluating Benjamin Graham's idea that one should identify and invest in value stocks for the long term. He easily deconstructs most of them and only has significant trouble with Graham's argument. I felt he slightly missed the boat on what Graham has to say, which is that value stocks will always have value. Malkiel points out that over a long period, both growth and value stocks do match up with the overall market, but value stocks do not have the monstrous dips that growth stocks have.

Chapter 12: A Fitness Manual for Random Walkers
This chapter is rather ordinary, as it is a basic chapter on how to build a healthy investment foundation, similar to ones that appear in most investment books. Get an emergency fund, make sure you're well insured, put as much investment as you can into accounts that are tax-sheltered (like Roth IRAs and 401(k)s), and so on - standard personal finance advice. He does strongly encourage home ownership, though. As for the question of what exactly to invest in, the next two chapters handle that.

Chapter 13: Handicapping the Financial Race: A Primer in Understanding and Projecting Returns from Stocks and Bonds
Ever heard the phrase "past performance is no guarantee of future results"? That's what this chapter is about: you can only use past performance as a very, very broad indicator of the future. In short, Malkiel believes that over a very long period, stocks will beat bonds and inflation, but with any period shorter than a decade, it's basically random and it's all about the risk you can stomach.

Chapter 14: A Life-Cycle Guide to Investing
Given that, the next chapter is basically a detailed guide on how to invest for yourself. In short, when your goal is more than a decade off, you should be heavily into stocks for the long haul, but if your goal is in the shorter term, you should be widely diversified, tending towards investments with lower risk (bonds and cash) as the big day approaches. In other words, Malkiel believes that investing in a target retirement fund is a really good idea.

Chapter 15: Three Giant Steps Down Wall Street
The book concludes with some more specific investment tips. In short, if you don't have the time to micromanage things, invest in an index fund. If you want to chase individual stocks, minimize your trading, only buy stocks that have numbers that are reasonable, and look for ones that have stories upon which people can build the "castles in the sky" mentioned in the first chapter. As for other options, like managed funds? He basically says no, or gives a very hesitant yes with a ton of caveats.

*Buy Or Don't Buy?*
We know one thing for sure: there's a ton of information packed away in this book concerning how the stock market - or any market - works. Most of the book focuses on different ways of analyzing the market to find an edge - and concludes that they're largely junk; the end of the book takes what was learned from this and applies it to investing in general.

This might sound really weighty, but it's not. This book was very easy to read, much easier than I expected before I opened the cover. There's a solid sense of humor behind it, nestled in with all the information, and the information itself is presented in a way that's easily digestible.

If you have any interest in how the stock market works, you should definitely read A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It gives a very critical look at what most people are saying about the stock market - and why a lot of it is potentially rubbish. It also clues you in on how to invest if you take that view of the world.

Of course, there are many other perspectives on the market, and the truth is that the stock market can be exploited by individuals, but that exploitation requires a lot of work, work that is simply not feasible for most people (or even for most investment professionals). While I recommend buying this book, I also recommend pairing it with a solid book on individual stock investing to get another perspective. Taking both viewpoints together will give you a very good understanding of how Wall Street - and pretty much any market - really works, and how you can either try to beat it or ride with it.

I recently finished reading the 9th edition of Burton Malkiel's classic text A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Ninth Edition. First published in 1973, this book is a classic text that deserves a place on any investor's bookshelf.

Malkiel presents two possible security valuation models - one based on a firm foundation of value and one based on finding a "greater fool" to sell your speculative buys to. He analyzes the history of investment bubbles from the Dutch tulip mania some two hundred years ago all the way through the tech stock bubble of the late 1990s. He discusses fundamental analysis of stocks and thoroughly trashes technical analysis. Finally, Malkiel presents a strategy that virtually guarantees that your investments will keep pace with the market with minimal investment of time.

I enjoyed and recommend this book for several reasons. First and foremost, it blows the whistle on many common "beat the market" strategies, including all manner of technical analysis. As a relatively young investor, I was always intimidated by the chartist strategies (moving averages, buy points, etc) but after reading Malkiel there is no cause for fear. Those strategies simply do not work.

Moreover, I found the book to be an easy read relative to many texts on investment. While he covers different types of stock analysis, modern portfolio theory, the efficient market hypothesis, and asset allocation in detail, the book is not weighted down with too much heavy terminology. His writing style, use of historical anecdotes, and ability to challenge your beliefs again and again keeps you riveted to the book.

Finally, I believe that the strategies presented in the book are clear, concise, and can be employed by anyone to their immense gain. Too many people pay for poor investment advice, make mistakes by chasing gains and paying for active portfolio management, or even pay absurd 12b-1 fees on underperforming mutual fund investments. By reading this book and taking Malkiel's advice to heart, I believe that just about anyone can end up with more dollars in hand.

On the other hand, the book does delve into financial topics that may be intimidating for someone completely new to the investment world. The basic message (buy and hold a well-diversified portfolio of extremely low-cost index funds) could be expressed much more succinctly. However, I wouldn't change a thing with this book...just be prepared for a wild ride that challenges everything you thought you knew about investing.

The Random Walk was a tremendous help in figuring out what to do as I take over my portfolio from my former paid investment advisor. What is perhaps most helpful is that many of the answers provided in the book are simple and straightforward solutions to complex issues. I enter retirement much more confident of how to manage my resources effectively while avoiding many of the financial errors I've made in the past.

In a nutshell Malkiel's advice is to own your own home, buy no-load index funds (equities and bonds), buy international index funds, and mix your investments according to your age. You should also have medical and plain term life insurance, and cash on hand for a few months in case of an emergency. This book is a complete course in how to manage your money effectively, whether you're a millionaire or a low-income earner. It also gently but firmly chastises proponents of get-rich-quick schemes such as day traders.

First, the book explains what is financial risk, and points out that everything is risky, even insured savings accounts since inflation can destroy the value of cash. Malkiel describes just how risky various investments are, and how the risk is one investment is often offset by the risk in another. Second, Malkiel describes a variety of specific investments (e.g. no load index funds, your own home, individual stocks) and suggests how individual investors should mix them, depending on their personal circumstances. For instance, an ambitious young woman in her twenties can consider aggressive high-risk high-growth funds. If they boom, she's rich, if they bust she's young enough to recover her losses through income. This would not be true of a middle-aged couple about to pay for their children's college years.

This edition is updated with a whole section on the internet bubble and other scandals. However, it maintains the same principle as all other editions; and Malkiel's advice remains that we should diversify broadly.

"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" should be in every family's library.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

Particularly in a day and age where mutual funds are often touting themselves on the television, this book has an excellent, largely unbiased message for the average investor: buy low cost index funds and stay in them for the long haul.

The book is exceptionally well written, covering most of the lessons of an introductory to intermediate finance course in a very accessible format (i.e. all the right *ideas* without the confusing math). He utilizes dozens of powerful examples and good data to show that his basic premise, despite now being 30 years old, is sound. Due to its theoretical strength and accessible style, this book could be of particular value to Undergrad Business and MBA students who find the professor's academic approach to an Introductory Finance course confusing. Get the big picture here, making the math just that much easier to follow. (5 stars for making difficult financial concepts readable and interesting)

Despite my strong recommendation for both his message and style, the book does have some drawbacks. Number one is that he has clearly taken a side on the issue and has thrown impartiality to the wind. Regularly, the author depends on "transaction costs" (the cost to trade) to ensure that a trading strategy cannot beat his preferred portfolio (implying that it would have succeeded without the transaction costs). This "sweeps under the rug" several clear counter-examples to the basic efficient market thesis in order to reinforce his index-investment message. While I understand his reasoning for doing so -- a desire not to encourage investment in high cost funds or heaven forbid day trading -- it does lead to some skepticism about his willingness to admit any possibility that his thesis has weaknesses. To that end, I would discourage readers who are familiar with CAPM and efficient-markets from reading the book (2 stars as a brush up).

In the end, however, I think the message is sound. Rather than cite trading costs, I think the message can effectively be said another way: If you spent 5h a day investigating stocks, what are the odds that you can beat a professional manager? If a manager has a staff of 20 that invest 8h per day investigating stocks, what are the odds that they're going to beat the whole financial services industry? If the whole industry is taking advantage of every opportunity to profit from small deviations, and you're going to pay a manager most if not all of that profit anyway, investing in an index basically gets you the benefit of thousands of mutual funds and investment bankers without the cost of any of them (or of your time to do research).

With qualifications to the highly technical reader, who should pass on the book, I can't, in good conscience, fail to give this book 5 stars for a profoundly valuable message targeted at the individual investor.

Let's say you were afflicted with the unhealthy notion that you could correctly predict which investment vehicles would outperform the market. This book would be a reasonable component of your therapy regime. In this book (the 2007 edition) Malkiel basically shows why the broad market indices (S&P, Dow, Russell 3000, etc) generally outperform even professional stock market gamblers. Actually, he doesn't really show us why exactly. The author more accurately just tells us it's true and hopes we'll take his word for it. Turns out, I do, but that's only because I've read a lot of other books (mostly by skeptical statisticians) that show in greater detail that Malkiel's premise is essentially correct.

The author is, I suppose, merely conservative in his investment outlook while I must be tin foil hat insanely paranoid. The main problem I have with his thinking is that while I agree with him that neither you nor I can not outperform general market indices, i.e. "the market", I'm not sure that the market can outperform investments like cash in the mattress or gold fillings. In the past couple of years, the market has even failed to outperform investments in cocaine and prostitutes.

I'm sure this book reads a lot better when you're not slogging through a Depression-like quagmire dominating the investment landscape. Here are some examples.

"I also think you should keep your risk within reasonable bounds by sticking with issues rated at least A by Moody's and Standard & Poor's rating services". Well isn't that precious? Turns out that bond ratings have been shown to be largely a scam. Even if they're not categorically corrupt, they stink enough that anyone relying on them when not dealing with "other people's money" is making a mistake.

"You may also wish to consider ownership of commercial real estate..." I guess the management at GE read this book. I'm under the impression that CRE is one of the main reasons GEs stock is about 1/6 of what it was 2 years ago. In Oct 2007 in my area of San Diego (including sublease space) the CRE vacancy rate is 25.6% with unprecedented vacant capacity. Of course you can't see that kind of anomalous event coming, however, I did. Which brings us to:

"Own your own home if you can possibly afford it." In 2004, I *could* have possibly purchased a house, but it would have been a financial disaster of such catastrophic proportions as to completely negate any gains of the magnitude envisioned by this book. In a different part of the book there is a table showing the earnings on a steady investment of $1200/year over *28* years. That's a long time and when I saw the final retirement tally, $277k, I thought, great, three decades of $100/month so one could recover from the disastrous loss one would have incurred buying the median home in San Diego in 2005. No thanks. It's never been a better time to be a renter.

It turns out that life is full of risks and that even being conservative in the way this book outlines is a huge gamble. The quotes above are really minor points in the book. My bigger problem is the major premise of the book which is that over the *long term*, stocks don't suck. Perhaps it's just my delightfully awful luck to be interested in investment science at a time of secular market trends that are like some kind of horror movie, but the fact is that the entire market can suck and suck you down with it for impressively long runs. He mentions the period he calls "The Age of Angst", 1969-1981, where the general returns on stocks was 5.6% and 3.8% for bonds. Could be worse, right? Beats a savings account. Wait... What's that? Inflation was 7.8%? Ouch! And 12 years is a big chunk of anyone's investment window.

If you're 20 and somehow miraculously have way more money than lifestyle and want to invest it in the stock market, *and* the notion holds that general stock market returns are positive over 50 years, then maybe this is some helpful advice. However, if you are such a person and such assumptions are correct, it'd be hard to screw that up.

Malkiel doesn't really give good fundamental reasons why the stock market should go up over the long term. The fact that it has in the past is a myth that he explicitly debunks, for example, when talking about selecting a mutual fund. I respected his low sensationalism approach. He knows that his strategy is boring but that is because he believes it is the safest bet and maybe it is. I, however, wasn't really convinced that it was any safer than any random investment, including spending all your money on fun things you like. The best piece of advice from the book is that many of the materials to help you research various investments can be found at your local library. Yes. Like this book.

This a great classic book by a highly distinguished academic.
It is a fascinating book in all of its editions through the years, not the least because it stimulates thought.
I have one rather significant difference with Professor Malkiel.
On page 253 of the hardbound editon the author writes about the "The Dividend Jackpot Approach". On page 254 the graph clearly shows the historic evidence indicating that future stock returns are higher (and risks lower) when the current dividend yield on stocks are higher rather than lower. So far so good. That is correct.
But then the author that these finds "are not nessisarily inconsistent with efficiency. Dividend yields of stocks tend to be high when interest rates are high, and they tend to be low when interest rates are low"
I don't know whether that is true on a statistical basis. I believe that John Bogle of Vanguard fame has done some work on that issue, and failed to find a statistical relationship between stock yields and bond yields.
In any case, I can think of some extremely important times when stock dividend yields did not reflect interest rates generally.
In 1946, for example, stock dividend yields were extremely high, around 8%, whereas interest rates were extremely low. Low term bond yields were in the range of only 2%.
Those investors who believed in buying value would have bought stocks and sold bonds. Those investors who, to the contrary, believed in efficient markets, would have thought that stock dividend yields and bond yields were simply reflecting economic conditions. The efficient market enthusiast would not have bought stocks and sold bonds.
Guess what? It was a great time to be in stocks and out of bonds. Bond investors lost considerable amounts of money in both nominal and real terms in the years after 1946. Stock holders had some great years. Efficient market enthusiasts were wrong.
Those of us who were active in the markets in the year 2000 may find it difficult to accept the efficient market hypothesis based on our experience in those years.
In the year 2000, stocks were bid up to the point where the Standard and Poor 500 were yielding only 1.15% from dividends. The Fed funds rate averaged 6.24% for the year 2000, Moody's AAA corporate bonds averaged 7.62% yield for the year. Those of us who look at value could not quite figure out how the stock market as a whole could possibly be a good buy in the year 2000. I didn't seem to make any sense at all.
Those who believed in the efficient market hypothesis advise investors not to try to pick value, not to try to market time, because the stock market is simply too efficient for that. They assured investors that stock priceds simply reflected economic conditions in 2000. They advised investors to stay with stocks, and even to continue to buy stocks on a dollar averaging basis, even in the year 2000 when stocks appeared to be so terribly overpriced.
Well, as it turns out the efficient market investment advisors turned out to be wrong, disastorously wrong. There was a correction in stock values starting in the year 2000, and stock prices fell very significantly until the end of 2002. Bond prices, on the other hand, were an extremey good buy in 2000.
This was not rocket science. It just didn't make common sense to be buying or the holding the broad stock market index in the year 2000, based on a simple calulation of relative yields.
In 1946 and in 2000 stock dividend yields did not in fact simply reflect interest rates on bonds. The value investor would have done much better than the efficient market investor, and this has been repeated many times in history.
So while this book is a great fun read, and an investment classic, the average investor should be aware of substantial evidence to the contrary of that presented in this book.
There is another point of view.

This book is an extensive and complete review of the investing sector, with a particular focus on equities. If you are trying to read one book only on this subject, this is probably the book that I would recommend. If you are quite familiar with this subject, you may not find as much depth as you hope but this book would serve as a historical reference. I particularly recommend reading the sections relating to the formation of bubbles and the subsequent collapses throughout the decade. The author clearly demonstrates how this is an inherent phenomena in the investing world, as we have recently experienced, and shows us ways to better understand and deal with these situations. I also liked the discussion about technical vs fundamental analysis of equities, when each should be used and how to harness the power of each. Finally, although the author does take a side on some of the topics he discusses, he does a great job of objectively presenting the different view points which is key for any reference material. A recommended primer!