Great reads that make great gifts
Try these classics for the investor in your life.
Do you need a fast, easy Christmas present for cousin Jean who likes, or should like, investing?
Then how about a book on the topic? My advice is don’t go for something new and hip. Few investment books stand the test of time. And most guides say the same old stuff — buy low, sell high, memorize some dumb rules of thumb. Blah, blah, blah. If it were only that easy.
Here are some of my all-time favorites.
For a son, daughter, niece, nephew or grandkid just beginning, you can’t beat Louis Engel’s How to Buy Stocks (Bantam Books, 1953). Although outdated in some ways, it makes up for that with a sense of history. It uses simple language to cover basics like, what is a stock? Then it delves deeper, covering most of the terms and concepts that any budding investors would ever need.
Try pairing it with Reminiscences
of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefèvre (George H. Doran, 1923), supposedly the pen name of legendary speculator Jesse Livermore. In real life, Livermore made and lost fortunes repeatedly before dying broke, killing himself. Reminiscences shows the futility of short-term timing.
Unless you were a stat addict in school, everyone should read Darrell Huff ’s How to Lie with Statistics
(W.W. Norton & Company, 1954), a fun read, exposing how statistical analysis is easily skewed to support a bias, theory or sales pitch. So many wild market claims rest on manipulated data — Huff teaches how to see through it.
Ben Graham’s The Intelligent In
vestor (Harper & Row, 1949) is one of the first five books any investor should
read. Easy, breezy, timeless wisdom— one of Warren Buffett’s favorite books. For experienced investors, buy Graham’s Security Analysis (McGrawHill, 1934), basically the stock picker’s original bible. Though not exactly light at 778 pages, it’s straightforward. I still refer to periodically.
For advanced investors, try Investment Analysis and Portfolio Man
agement by Frank Reilly (Dryden Press, 1985). A former business school dean at Notre Dame, Reilly is the only academic investment text I love. David Dreman’s Contrarian Invest
ment Strategy ( Random House, 1980) will eradicate anyone’s reverence for Wall Street “pros” or their earnings projections.
Biographies bring greatness to life. John Train’s The Money Masters (Harper & Row, 1980) chronicles nine legendary postwar investors, including Graham, Sir John Templeton and my father, Phil Fisher. Forbes originally called it “as good a perspective on investing as you could get at Harvard or Stanford in a full school year for $10,000” (more like $45,000 today). You can’t go wrong with biographies of any of the greats — Graham, Templeton, Bernard Baruch, Pierpont Morgan, Hetty Green or the Rothschilds.
For growth investors, my father’s Common Stocks and Uncommon
Profits (Harper & Row, 1958) is the original bible — also one of Warren Buffett’s favorites and the first investment book to make the New York Times Bestseller list.
Not related to me, Irving Fisher’s The Stock Market Crash – And Af
ter (MacMillan Co., 1930) is an antique, pricey, fascinating time capsule — penned early in the crash by America’s pre-eminent, pre-Depression economist who wrongly believed a rebound was nigh. Readers get a dose of perverse valuable lessons about 1929 and how wrong the learned can be.
For Bitcoin buyers, try Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (L.C. Page & Co., 1841), which takes readers through history’s biggest bubbles. While old, nothing really important has changed since then in financial markets or mass psychology.
Finally, for those preferring pure business books to investment bibles, try Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow
Rich (The Ralston Society, 1937) or Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (Simon and Schuster, 1936) — a one-two punch of psychological power for success.