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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, now improved, April 1, 2003
This book is an improved version of their original. Particularly better was the coverage on what makes a durable competitive advantage. Also, the formulas and approach was organized better.By reading the negative reviews of this book and its original you will find that this is a book written to be easily read. The authors did a great job of cleaning up the the "I knew Warren" tone of the first book. The only drawback of this book is its over-simplifying the complications that can occur when you do a value approach - particularly when you look at real data. Still, this new book gives many examples to walk the reader through the methodology. There is no statistical results shown that this method does indeed beat the market. You have to take it on faith that this methodology is used by Buffet, that it is what produced his great success, and that it can be duplicated in today's market. Still, this is a great book, and I recommend it to investors, and to businessmen who need to understand more about "durable competitive advantage" and the kinds of businesses they should be creating. There is much more that needs to be said about competitive advantage. There are several books on this (starting with Michael Porter). This book gives a simplified version. I think it is important to know that Buffet is not a Jack Welch type of manager. I would say he is closer to a Harold Geneen in that he is more of a "rentier" than a get-in-the-trenches manager/leader like Welch. This effects his choice of businesses. His approach is to own the only gravel pit in the county, and milk it for many years. This is certainly a good approach, but one that is difficult to pull off because a competitive advantage is difficult to hold on to. It appears that significant monies were made by Buffet using investments not following this method (hedging, speculating on interest rates). These have provided buffers against when the value investing techniques didn't work. Perhaps most important in the author's and Buffet's approach is the use of stock selection criteria that are outside of the radar of the average investor. And, that criteria is the screening on "durable comepetive advantage." Few investors screen stocks on this qualitative data. If this criteria indeed selects successful companies then you will do better than those without this information (assuming you buy right). After reading this book, you can find out more on competitive advantage and stock prices by reading the books by A. David Silver (Quantum Companies). He is one of my favorite authors on durable competitive advantage. You should also read some of the recent books on how to research companies, like the one by Hoover. There are many books on value investing. There is even a "Dummies" book on it. All of these are recommended because you will find that there can be a lot more to it than presented in this book. I would think that some kind of value investing test should be a requirement for all CEO's. Hopefully such a focus would keep certain CEO's and their partners-in-crime (CFO's) from focusing on hyping up the stock price through fraud, and get back to producing real business results. This book does not tell you how to detect puffed up earnings and fraudulent balance sheets. You'll need to read other value investing books for this. Overall, I believe that if you follow the simple formulas in this book, you will find good value stocks. Buy this book, rather than the other previous ones. John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX
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by David Clark
by Mary Buffett
by Peter Lynch
