Customer Reviews

The Triumph of Contrarian Investing : Crowds, Manias, and Beating the Market by Going Against the Grain

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First let me say, Ned Davis Research does excellent work. I was hoping to get some insight into the types of research his company uses. But I'm sorry to say I can not recomend this book to anyone but those completely unfamiliar with sentiment analysis. Only the basics are covered. Over half of the book is stock charts showing fundamental variables (I thought this was about sentiment?) and is a waste of space. He does say he is using these variables as a measure of investor sentiment but maybe they could have used a handful of charts as examples, not over half a book that is only 170 pages long.

Buyer beware...the book is padded in large part by graphs and data. The actual chapters are short and can be covered in a day...This is a beginner's book with little insights...Professional stay away!

I have respect for Ned Davis as an analyst and this led to me buying his book.What a disappointment.Only 70 pages and the rest meaningless page after page of charts.I believe it is misleading to advertise a book of 188 pages and then only have 70 pages of content!! Buyer beware

I read this book and loved it. All of the other review/criticism seem to focus on the fact that it is too simplistic or too short. If you know that going in then you won't be disappointing like they were.

The charts are good resources. The 70 pages of charts illustrate one company stock chart per page. They give measure of price/dividend or price/sales ratios that indicate overly fearful and overly confident ranges. To this day, even though they are outdated, I refer to those ratios and ranges if I am doing due diligence on one of the stocks he has charted.

I loaded up on Budweiser in 2005-06, in part because of their overly fearful positioning (and of course dividend and positive attributes not included in this book). That trade was hugely successful for me and these charts and range analysis added to my confidence level. If NDR wrote an updated version of this with those companies and more, and their stock charts and overlyfearful/overly confident guages, I would buy the book just as a resource. It only takes one trade, one good call to have resources MORE THAN pay themselves. I keep this one reaching distance from my desk along with about 2 dozen others I consider worthwhile. Now that it is old I would really give it a 4 star rating, but I wanted to weight the average up because I thought all the one star ratings were incredibly extreme.

Buy it used or check it out from your local library, but don't let those negative reviews deprive you of seeing what nuggets you might find.

This book did not contain much information, only 70 pages of text. The rest of the book being made up of a series of graphs.

The author frequently referred in the book to subscription research services he offers, as if the book was an advert.

I was disappointed with this book.