Greatest Books for Investing & Money

Vibhuti Nandan
10 min readJun 11, 2022

In this article, I’m going to present the books about Investing & Money that I think will benefit your stock market journey the most.

Moreover, I will rank them from simple to understand to more difficult to understand,

so, that you’ll know in which order you should read them

if you are quite new to the world of investing.

Here are the books that will be covered.

Without further ado, let’s dive deeper into each one of them.

We are bringing you the best tips and tools for reaching financial freedom,

through stock market investing.

Best book for Investing & Money

1. The Little Book that Beats the Market.

On the list, and the first book that I think a new investor should read

is a book called The Little Book that Beats the Market.

It was first released in 2006 and the author of the book is Joel Greenblatt,

the manager of Gotham Funds, a hedge fund with $5.6b in assets under management.

At 112 pages, the book definitely deserves its name, but don’t let that fool you!

The Little Book That Beats the Market reveals what is probably

my favourite stock screening strategy — the Magic Formula.

The Magic Formula finds stock picks by looking at

two important performance indicators

– returns on assets (or capital)

and the price/earnings ratio (or earnings yield).

Joel Greenblatt discusses why these two key performance indicators are essential

for successful stock market investing

and he does so in a really neat and humoristic way.

The book is so over the top and blunt at times

that I’ve been laughing out loud while reading it.

And I tell you — that’s quite uncommon for a book about investments.

Just take this quote from the book which I’ve presented on the channel before.

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you’re looking for

is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match.

You may live, but you’re still an idiot.

This book is like 60% education, 40% humor, which makes it a really enjoyable read.

As an extra resource, I should add that

the Magic Formula screener can be found and used

for free at magicformulainvesting.com.

2 One up on Wall Street

On the list is also a more easy-going book

and it’s called One up on Wall Street,

and is written by Peter Lynch.

It was originally published in 1989.

Peter Lynch is a legendary investor from Fidelity Investments,

and he was the manager of the Magellan Fund there from 1977-to 1990.

During this period he averaged a 29.2% annual return

and grew the fund from $18m to $14b.

That is quite insane so it’s no wonder that the book

has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide.

At 334 pages

, the book is more extensive than the Little Book that Beats the Market

for sure, but it’s still quite an easy read.

The book preaches that you should use what you already know

to make money in the stock market

and for me, this excerption from the book was something of a wakeup call:

“In general, if you polled all the doctors, I’d bet only a small percentage would turn out

to be invested in medical stocks, and more would be invested in oil;

and if you polled the shoe-store owners,

more would be invested in aerospace than in shoes,

while aerospace engineers are more likely to dabble in shoe stocks.

Why it is that stock certificates, like grasses, are always greener

in somebody else’s pasture, I’m not sure.”

The highlights of the book are chapters 8 & 9.

In chapter 8, Peter Lynch discusses the 13 traits of a “ten-bagger”,

referring to stocks that have a chance to increase tenfold.

In chapter 9, he discusses 6 traits of the reversed ten-bagger, referring to stocks

which are heading straight for the dumpster.

Some of the characteristics of a ten-bagger which he lists in chapter 8 are quite funny

and a bit counter-intuitive, such as:

– The institutions don’t own it, and the analysts don’t follow it

– It’s in a no-growth industry

And best of all …

– There’s something depressing about it

After you’ve read and understood The Little Book that Beats the Market

and One up on Wall Street

3. The University of Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire Hathaway is of course Warren Buffett’s firm,

and it’s one of the largest public companies existing.

This book has a very appropriate title

because the author Daniel Pecaut has been attending

the annual shareholder meetings of Berkshire Hathaway, where Warren Buffett

and his right-hand man Charlie Munger perches about investing, for about 30 years.

These 30 years are summed up in the book.

The length of the book is 338 pages, so almost exactly the same length

as One up on Wall Street, and it is just a bit more advanced.

It’s also quite new as it was first published in 2017.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are two great minds, truly.

And they aren’t just smart, they are witty too.

Just consider what they have to say when they hear rich people

in western countries complain about high taxes:

We think — at least I think

— I’m extraordinarily well treated by this society,

and I think most people with high incomes are.

I think if you transported most of them to Bangladesh or Peru or something,

they would find out how much of it is them and how much is the society.

Or sometimes they are just really blunt, which is great too.

Such as when Charlie Munger is asked what he thinks about the GAP figure EBITDA

which appears in stock market companies’ income statements.

Yeah, I think you would understand any presentation using the word EBITDA

if every time you saw that word you just substituted the phrase, “bullsh*t earnings.”

The University of Berkshire Hathaway includes notes from the highlights

of the annual shareholder meetings of the years 1986-to 2017.

If you wish to see the meetings between 1994–2020 yourself

you can head over to CNBC’s Warren Buffett Archive.

This is a great resource, but the meetings are approximately 5 hours each,

so that’s about 135 hours of watch-time in total.

This book sums up the same information in about 10.

4. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

The 4th book that I would recommend anyone to read is Philip Fisher’s book

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits.

Warren Buffett is often said to have been

85% Benjamin Graham and 15% Philip Fisher,

and Buffett were inspired especially by this book, which originally is from 1958.

The book is quite short at about 200 pages,

but it has a few more difficult learnings.

Not that they are technically or mathematically more difficult than anything

you’ll find in the previous three books, but to apply them in practice is quite hard.

I’ll have Charlie Munger present to you the gist of the book:

The basic idea of that it was hard to find good stocks,

and it was hard to find good investments,

So, you wanted to be in good investments.

therefore, you just find a few of them that you knew a lot about,

now concentrate on those, it seemed to me such an obviously good idea.

And indeed, it’s proved to be an obviously good idea.

Yet, 98 percent of the investing world doesn’t follow it.

That’s been good for us.

It’s been good for you.

Phil Fisher introduced Warren Buffett to the idea of buying great companies

and holding on to them forever.

And Fisher practiced what he preached.

His and his clients’ investment in Motorola allegedly became a 2000-bagger

after he had held on to it for many decades.

With a 2000-bagger you only need $500 invested to become a millionaire.

One of the highlights of the book is when Phil Fisher presents how individual investors

can use main street resources to beat Wall Street.

He advises serious investors to investigate companies by talking to their suppliers,

customers, employees, ex-employees, and best of all — competitors.

He says that if you were to talk to the top 5 companies within a specific industry

and ask each company about the other 4, you’d have a really good picture afterward

on who the strongest player in the business is.

5 The Intelligent Investor

on this list is The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

I know, you know, everyone knows — this list could never have been without it.

After all, I’m not exactly unbiased.

Benjamin Graham is “the father of value investing”

and was the teacher of Warren Buffett.

The Intelligent Investor is his most famous work,

even though I would argue that it’s not the most complete one.

The book is more technical than the previous books on this list,

but it has definitely stood the test of time,

considering that it was first published in 1949.

You’ll probably not get the most out of it if you aren’t at least a bit experienced

within the field of investing though.

It’s also 640 pages long.

The book has three core messages:

– Intrinsic value: A stock is a piece of a business,

which means that it has an intrinsic (or real) value

– Mr. Market:

The stock market swings from too pessimistic to too optimistic.

A true investor is not swayed by Mr. Market’s unpredictable moods and merely sees

rising and falling prices as an opportunity, not as a conveyor of information.

– Margin of Safety:

Decisions in the stock market must always be made

with a built-in margin of safety.

This means that you should insist on buying stocks with a large discount

to their intrinsic (or real) business value.

So those are the key takeaways.

And I wouldn’t want to argue with Warren Buffett about which chapters

that is the most important from the book:

Well, Chapters 8 and Chapters 20 are really all you need to do to get rich in this world.

If you could say that Warren Buffett has written any of the books on this list himself,

it would be this one.

6 The Essays of Warren Buffett

6th book is “The Essays of Warren Buffett”,

which is a book where Lawrence Cunningham

has rearranged and structured the most important takeaways

from all of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder letters into a book.

Buffett has written these letters himself and the book was published in 1997.

The book is 328 pages long, but there’s too much meat in here.

Buffett covers everything from the activity required to become a great investor,

to mergers & acquisitions,

and to what a shitty place Wall Street is,

the evolution of the newspaper business

here, in human psychology,

to the failure of academics in finance,

to the importance of contrarianism,

and back to what a shitty place Wall Street is again.

Buffett is an exceptional writer, teacher, and investor,

and it definitely shows in this book.

Sometimes, even though he is trying his best to explain his thinking

to a lesser experienced audience,

it just shows how far ahead his mind is,

and it can be quite difficult to grasp some of the concepts.

An exceptional book nonetheless.

I should add that almost all of the Berkshire Hathaway

annual shareholder letters can be found at

berkshirehathaway.com/letters for free,

but Lawrence Cunningham does a great job of distilling the information.

7 Security Analysis

And for the final pick among my 7 favorite books about investing

we have Security Analysis,

also written by Benjamin Graham.

I’d say that Security Analysis is Graham’s magnum opus,

even though the Intelligent Investor has gained more popularity.

It just covers a lot more information.

And at a massive 851 pages divided into 52 chapters, that definitely makes sense.

You’ll learn everything from the psychology of investing, to different types of securities,

to the financial statements, to portfolio structure to stock market movements.

I do recommend that you get the 2nd edition of the book which is from 1940,

if you decide to buy it.

This edition has a lot of great examples and a few of the later versions of the book

have apparently distorted Graham’s words a bit.

Here, I’ll highlight three of my favorite chapters from Security Analysis:

Chapter 2, covers the importance of

studying qualitative and quantitative data

in your search for excellent returns.

How these two differ in their value and correctness is discussed.

Chapter 43 is about the significance of

current-asset values in listed market companies.

This is the key ingredient for screening for net-net stocks

which Benjamin Graham was famous to do.

And chapter 50, is about the discrepancies which sometimes occur

between the price and the value of stocks.

The chapter is about where you are most likely to find discrepancies,

how you can be more certain once you think you’ve found them,

and about an alternative approach to stock market investing

which I haven’t really investigated too much myself,

but which do seem promising from a reversion to the mean standpoint:

Don’t buy companies that are likely to fall into financial difficulties

– buy those that already have.

And there you have it.

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