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Summary: The Best Book I've Read About Investing in The Stock Market
Review: There are many good books about the market but Jeremy will take you on an interesting historical journey through the economies of the past and give you practical explanations as to why the markets have reacted as they have in the past.
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Summary: The best introduction to true and dedicated investment ever.
Review: This book is not meant to make you rich in your pocket, although it could if you carefully pay attention to its message "patience is the vertue". Great outline/charts to illustarte stocks advantage against any investment mechanism in the long run.
I got this book as a gift from my broker 5 years ago and have been wiser since.
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Summary: Good book but ignores reality
Review: This book tries to make the case that a portfolio of diversified stocks will help you insure good returns for the longer term. This fact has held true for many years in the past but since the emergence of the internet this approach may be flawed. After the internet news travels quickly and any person can check on good or bad news on their computer and react instantaneously. I think the argument of buying the new intel or microsoft and holding on is flawed. You do not believe that, check with people who bought Enron, Worldcom, Global crossing, United airlines, JDS uniphase, Tyco and I could name many more. This IS a diversified portfolio and it could have performed horribly. If you are lucky enough to have a diversified portfolio of solid companies you could make 8%/year if you are lucky, on the other hand if you pick the most promising sector and rotate you could do much better . In this case , however you will have to get out when the sector you are in shows weakening.You could have done much better by rotating into technology in 98 , out into reits in 2000 and out into gold stocks in 2001. Another good strategy is to use options to protect your profits and generate income especially if you do not want to rotate. One of the biggest advntages of options is that you have to take action by expiration one way or the other which is a good antidote for the buy and hold mentality. For useful stock and option books please check "Option volatility and pricing " to understand the ways options are priced. Also , " rule the freakin markets" for the psychologycal edge needed for investing; and "Generate thousands on your stocks without selling them " for profitable stock and option strategies using actual examples .
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Summary: Outdated. Do not buy the author's hypothesis uncritically
Review: This is an outdated, but still useful introductory investment book. I would like to warn that the book definitely does not pay enough attention to the valuation and bad case scenarios: the real truth is that in case of worst case scenarios investors retire before they can enjoy any sizable return from their stock holdings "in the long run". The book also most definitely underemphasizes the pain stock investors suffer after a crash. Moreover typical for the book "exponential" charts like the one on the cover conceal the brutal reality of periods like Japan's multi-year recession. Beating the good bond portfolio "in a long run" is far from easy outside of periods of "irrational exuberance". In the case the investor faces a decline (or fairly flat decade) for stocks in the second half on their twenty year 401 investment cycle it requires a proper mix of bonds and stocks and some sucessful trades, not a pure stock portfolio and cost averaging. Let's assume that the person was born in 1950, started to invest 10K a year at the age of 40 into 401K account and will be employed till the retirement age. With a simple 100% bond portfolio and 6% average return at the age 65 he/she will have ~$550K. With 100% investment into S&P 500 and assuming after year 2002 an average return of 5% with 10% declines in 2008 and 2013 this investor will get ~$450K: a noticeable difference. The author also ignores a typical investors behavior during the bubbles: IMHO worst-case scenario are amplified by the fact many individual investors were lured into stock market exactly before the downturn (bear market of March 2001 - March 2002). An investor that switched all his money into S&P in March 24 2001 (when the index was 1521) in March 22, 2002 needs ~30% upswing just to break even. And a single year with 20-30% gain of S&P 500 may not repeat until his retirement. Unfortunately this is pretty realistic case for many individual investors. The second important point missed by the author is that while the stock market cannot be accurately timed, buying stocks at high valuations is an invitation to low future returns. Robert Shiller (the author of Irrational Exuberance, 2000) argued that twenty year returns following market peaks in P/E ratios had inflation adjusted annual returns -0.2%-+1.9%. Smithers and Wright (Valuing Wall Street, 2000) came to pretty similar conclusions. In such cases stocks fail to outperform inflation protected bonds. And twenty years is what most investors have to create 401K retirement fund. One needs to understand that the US economy might be paying the costs of "irrational exuberance" for some years to come. All-in-all the book was definitely influenced by the US stock bubble and as a typical "raging bull" the author definitely exaggerates potential returns of an all-stock 401K portfolio and ignores subtle problems. For example, it completly ignores an important problem of "share inflation" that has come in forms ranging from stock splits to extravagant options awards for executives or excessive issuance for acquisitions. It ignores Enron-style effects when along with fake earning reports the U.S. market has been flooded with shares sold by executives and there were not enough buyers to absorb the flow. Although book provides a useful framework for the investor, do not buy the "Stocks for the Long Run" hypothesis uncritically. For those investors that are ~50 years old, it is important to understand that the book does not take into account far reaching economic consequences of potential low annual returns on their stock market investments in the last decade before their retirement.
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Summary: one more thing
Review: This is just an addendum to a review I already wrote; some other reviewers point out that this is not a guide on how to pick stocks, and that is true. I would like to emphasize that the studies of past market behavior described in this book don't seem to point to any reliable method of picking individual stocks, or even evaluating fund managers in any statistically significant manner. This was not a problem for me; the main thrust of the book is that the stock market is the best (only) way to ensure that 'wealth' a) is not gobbled up by inflation and b) has a good chance of appreciating past inflation. With those simple goals in mind, investing in a whole-market index fund with a couple of more focused other index funds doesn't seem like such a bad idea. To really take advantage of the historical perspective offered in this book, it seems very important to keep dollar-cost averaging into these funds even (especially!) during market down times. If your time horizon is long enough, those relatively low-cost purchases will come back in a big way. If you just buy once, you can be sure that after 40 years that purchase will not have lost ground to inflation, but there is no guarantee on the state of the market at the time you need to cash out; to really take advantage of the performance of the market, you must keep buying into it through thick (more or less) but especially thin. In that regard, the secret to financial success is not so much picking x amount of 10-baggers as it is to keep putting money away through all financial conditions that you can manage. Spend less, save more, and put your savings where they have the best chance to grow.
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Summary: Classic Work for your Library
Review: This is one of the few "must have" bookd for investors. I would also include Charles Ellis' "Winning the Loser's Game" and Malkiel's "Random Walk on Wall Street." No one can time markets consistently well, and very few of us are superb stock pickers, and anyone who purports to tell you you can do these things with a little study is deluded or dishonest. What you can do is control your own behavior: buy (and keep buying) a diversified stock portfolio and hold on no matter what happens. Be grateful for the market's volatility -- it is the source of the return stocks give over and above that of bonds. Siegel shows you why this approach works, and why, in the long run (to me, ten years or more), stocks are safer than bonds: because stocks are more likely to give you the return you need to reach your investment goals.
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Summary: A must read if you are interested in the market
Review: This is one of the first books that should be read by anyone interested in the market. If investors follow the advice of Professor Sigel,, they will be able to spend far less time on investment activities and more time on liesure activities. Professor Siegel makes it clear as to how people should invest
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Summary: Primitive and Naive Empiricism
Review: This is the first bad review I have written in my life; it took some effort on my part to do so and I would have not done it had I not thought that the ideas in the book were dangerously misleading and merit some warning in their interpretation --particularly that I look around me and see people close to retirement having to suffer from the consequences of such toxic ideas. That stocks (in the Anglo Saxon world) HAVE YIELDED high returns does not mean much for the future.
As a skeptical empiricist I believe that it is this kind of books that helped fuel the naive bull market and the naive belief in some stock market properties (which it my or may not have). The fact that the book was written by an academic gives it a credibility it should not have. The book follow arguments that to a middlebrow seem compelling but fraught with what I call survivorship biases.
To get the argument read Maggie Mahar's book on the boom; it shows why such ideas can be extemely destructive.
All I can say is that we have a catalogue here of the following :
1) naive empricicism
2) primitive inference/inductive fallacies
3) promulgation of dangerous ideas
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Summary: a must read
Review: This is without a doubt the best investing book for someone who wants to learn what to expect from the stock market. It gives a thorough analysis of the most extensive collection of historic data anywhere. It covers all the important topics that a long term investor must address, from diversification to tax advantages. Reading this book will teach you how truly difficult it is to beat the market. It gives you a fuller appreciation of what kind of gains can be made by people who ignore the urge to time the market, and just focus their attention on long term goals. If you are interested in retiring wealthy, then this is the book for you.
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Summary: Best Beginners Book (imho)
Review: This remains one very, if not "the most" comprehensive, approachable, vast overview on stocks & bonds, inflation & money markets, the business cycle & market psychology. The arguments presented in this book are grounded in long-range empirical historical results backed up with carloads of analytical data to back up its assumptions. One of Jeremy Siegel's main points is that the time-frame horizon of various investment vehicles and strategies can be quite decisive in determinating your financial goals and end-results. In the end, a lot (if not everything) depends on the time-frame you are willing to consider... The more time you have available, the safer you could/should feel towards your principal, and that more especially if it consists of stocks. Another of Jeremy Siegel's arguments, which is incumbent on the precedent one, is that the greatest long-term erosive power of wealth remains inflation (an undesired by-product of growth), and that the safest cushion towards and fence against inflation is still the stock-market, followed closely by real-estate property. The final and conclusive argument is that the best way to index the global generation of wealth and general progress of civilization (get a fair share of the pie, if you wish), is to own stocks in the long run. This reveals itself as the best way to piggy-ride the world's long-range generation of wealth, and the safest way to park your wealth long-time, more especially if you have a few decades ahead of yourself before you eventually need or want to get your hands on it... so that it can be said with a certain amount of certainty that this is definitively not a book for the hot-blooded, quick-buck day-trading artists and other various market-wizards, although some of the information it contains could (could) eventually (eventually) be put to some (good) use by some (some) of them, at one time or another. The fact is that, apart from historical points and empirical arguments, the work is spiced up and loaded with a great plenty of market wisdom (the vanity of attempting to predict or time the various business cycles), market and investor psychology (the vanity of following the heard, and how difficult it is sometimes not to do so), various historical anecdotic facts of which some of them are almost useless although interesting (sell on Fridays and buy on Mondays, Octobers are bad months for the stock market, the January effect, etc.) and others relatively intriguing (the stock market generally fared better under Democratic than under Republican presidencies - is it because the hands-off attitude of Democrats which do not claim to understand the Economy, and to be its well-intentioned friend, is more reassuring to investors at large, giving them a long-sought relief and allowing them to finally concentrate on their subject without being disturbed and distracted by various demagogic ramblings?), and a few useful facts (in a global market downturn, it can be quite handy to short spiders amongst other things, as these are exempt of the prohibitive downtick rule), the importance of dividend streams in roughly assessing market valuations (valuations based on dividend yields, like the valuation of bonds, are at the cornerstone of many other valuation techniques such as the cash-flow and free cash-flow valuations), the different behaviour of small- and mid-caps compared to that of large-caps in various periods of the business cycle, the relative safety of nifty-fifty blue-chips, the self-cancelling effect of various widely applied financial strategies (in the end result, all the smart and active negators of the efficient market theory tend to establish a theory they see as and would like to prove as flawed), the relative attractiveness of various index-based passive investments, etc. etc. etc. Anyway, to cut matters short, if it cannot be said that this book constitutes a must-have for all sorts of audiences under the sun, I believe one can venture to state with a certain amount of safety that this book may certainly constitute a must-read at one point or another of one's personal financial education. Although some of the historical-empirical-analytical work contained in this book has at times been used as an advocacy of the historic legitimacy of the explosive bull-market in the late-nineties (remember Alan Greenspan stating at the turn of the century that it may well be "possible" that the "new economy" has now allowed us to enter a new era of perpetual and unrestrained growth, just like others claimed that it was the case in the late twenties before the crash), its almost scientific empiric groundings make it still a highly recommendable book today, and that to a great variety of audiences, so that all irony and sarcasm apart, it can be safely asserted that its broad and historic approach allows one to state that it remains a book for the long run, regardless of the momentary market downturns and/or stagnations, or maybe especially because of them (remember that when everyone is a bear, it usually pays to be a long-term bull, although the reverse might not necessarily be true).
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