Rating: 
Summary: Hype overshadows caveats
Review: Siegel seems intent on convincing investors to buy and hold stocks, yet a close reading of his caveats clearly takes away much of his hype. For a detailed critique, see Eldred's Value Investing in Real Estate. You will never again think that you should hold (as Siegel urges) 80 to 110 percent of your portfolio in stocks. As Ben Graham advised throughout his long career, relative pricing and yields matter most. And right now, investors can find much higher expected returns in rental properties.
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Summary: Good for Stocks, Bad for the Individual Investor
Review: Siegel's book is a good read, and he makes the case for equities a compelling one. However, if you're already aware that bonds, savings accounts, and gold are terrible long-term investments due to erosion from taxes and inflation (let alone lousy performance), then this book's strongest point is moot. Siegel's extensive research (some of which has been previously published) overwhelmingly supports the long-term investor; not the long-term investor as defined by today's market paradigm, i.e., long = 12-18 months, but rather looooong, like 20-30 years long...Two-day corrections or eighteen month bear markets can't hold a candle to Siegel's evidence proving that being 100% invested for long periods of time makes for sound financial acumen. Unfortunately, after all that great evidence, Siegel leaves individual investors at the altar, as he concludes that the only way for us to enjoy any investment success is to plunk most of our money in diversified mutual funds with low expense ratios (preferably index funds). This comes off like some kind of a thinly-veiled Vanguard endorsement and is extremely anti-climactic, considering all the great info in the previous chapters. I guess it's good to have on your bookshelf the next time the market drops 512 points and you become tempted to liquidate, because Seigel definitively proves you're better off sticking with stocks through thick and thin.
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Summary: Believe It
Review: Siegel's STOCKS FOR THE LONG RUN legitimizes one of my favorite investor quotes ever, from an early Rothschild: "I buy when blood is running in the streets of Paris." Get this book and review your approach to stocks vs. bonds. (The sooner the better.)
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Summary: The Best Introduction and Reference, Praise is Deserved
Review: Siegel's third edition is the best introduction to the traditional assets classes (i.e., stocks and bonds) that I have ever read, hands-down. This book has two strengths: One, it is a rigorous empirical study of historical market returns and their components. Two, it is broad and accessible introduction to various investment theories and styles, economic influences (e.g., inflation, business cycles, economic data) and newer product categories like exchange-traded funds. This is an ambitiously broad anthology chock-full of important topics, so it serves as a great starting point for new students of investment theory. For example, his Chapter on "Gold, the Federal Reserve and Inflation" is a brief, helpful introduction to the history of monetary policy. Another great Chapter is "Market Volatility," which illustrates that market volatility has been remarkably stable over the long run, with some violent exceptions.What I really love about Siegel is his intent: he wants to educate the average investor and he is not dogmatic. I understand that a handful of negative reviews arise from a credible concern that the stock market could be a lot more hazardous in the future than in the past, but Siegel is not blindly extrapolating into the future. It is pretty unfair to call this "naïve empiricism," by the way. His conclusion is more specific and relative: he believes stocks should outperform bonds, but they will downshift from the long-run historical pattern to outperform bonds by about 2%, give or take. He reaches this conclusion by showing how the stock market has historically averaged roughly 7% percent in real returns over any long-run stretch. He then presents various alternative valuation models and shares his carefully qualified conclusion: that economic factors justify an modest upward revision in the price-earnings ratio (P-E ratio) to the low 20s, and from that starting point, we might look forward to real equity returns of "4 to 5 percent." Granted, he then goes on to discuss some factors that could well propel returns even higher, and one big unfavorable factor that could send them lower (i.e., the demographic problem of fewer investors in the developed world). But you get to see how his model works, and he serves up each assumption logically and in balanced form so that you can consider the conclusion for yourself. In this vein and offered as a minor critique at the margin, I happen to question his assumption that higher equity valuations per se lead to increased earnings (via cheaper stock offerings and hence cheaper investment capital) because I do not think you can necessarily assume that more capital leads to better investments. Also, he does not address or incorporate the dilution effects of employee stock options. Similarly, his case for "buy and hold" is balanced. The data in the Chapter on "Stocks and the Business Cycle" could in fact be used to advocate market timing. Siegel shows that successful timing (or more specifically, buying near the bottom) produces impressive returns. He just thinks it is really hard to predict business cycles. This is the bible of traditional classes, and so I would note that there is no discussion of so-called alternative investments (e.g., hedge fund, private equity, real estates). Also, I missed the lack of an explicit discussion of asset allocation; can we maybe get that in the next edition?
Rating: 
Summary: Are you Kidding me
Review: Since they are "Academics" I expect the mumbo jumbo that they write, but to actually think that people follow there guidance is baffling. If you want to lose money, follow the ideas in this book. Maybe as soon as one of these guys does something in the market they can publish, but until then I say save your nickels and buy something useful
Rating:
Summary: a very good historical summary of the stock market
Review: Stocks for the Long Run is a well-written book that is filled with general history, quantitative analysis of past market performance, and also an overview of markets in general. Despite its density, it is a fairly quick read. I found the historical perspective of the stock market to be very useful. Behavior of the market from 1802 to the present is not only interesting but also gives a much more grounded view of market activity than is often found these days when 'long term' might go all the way back to 1994. Too bad this edition just preceded the totally bonkers bull market activity from 1998 to March 2000 and subsequent crash/return to normalcy. The book has a much better overview of investment vehicles than I've seen in any beginning investing guide; all the stuff that is downplayed as too complicated for novices, for instance. Not that I'm about to get into shorting index futures as a hedge on my individual stocks, but I am glad to have a better handle on what is going on in those markets out there. Personally I like the detail that went into discussions of various anomalies (January effect, some days or months being worse than others), but that could just be me. There is an extent to which some 'backtested strategies' are a little too blithely pawned off as reliable into the future, so I am glad I've read other material than just this book. But I also appreciate that certain other myths are deconstructed as well. I guess I would say I believe some of the disproofs of myths more than I do the occasional myths that are given some tenuous level of support in the book, but again that could just be my own skeptical nature. I think this is an excellent book to read somewhere early in a person's exposure to markets, but probably not the first and certainly not the only one.
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Summary: Lucent look at how the market works.
Review: The author has done an excellent job of looking at the market in the most practical way. He studied its history. The results of his work have important lessons. No long term investor can afford to be without the insights this analysis brings. Buy it.
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Summary: holds up well
Review: The book has held up rather well over the years despite the drastically changing economic conditions. Some good data and good analysis as well.
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Summary: Comments to the Reader From New York, below
Review: The reader from New York criticized that the author does not consider the risks of more volatile countries. I think this is incorrect. The whole book assumes you have a fair diversification of your assets. I personally live in a small country so I have over half of my money invested abroad. I have lots of money in an EU index fund, some in a Global US index fund and a portion also in my homecountry (a small EU country). If you missed the point of diversifying your assets, then you may have missed some of the most important points made in the book!
Rating:
Summary: Must Reading
Review: There are few books that both professionals and investors can read and understand that can provide the fundamental information to provide the basis to successfully understand investing. Siegel puts to rest the many beliefs about investing that have no value or basis. His focus on the long term is a welcome contrast to the thirty second sound bites on TV and focus on individual stocks that comprise most of what is provided by magazines, newspapers, web sites or the brokerage industry.
Rod Hagenbuch
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