Books

Hi! There was just a relevant discussion to this, you may check this thread

I am a self-taught value investor learning how to invest from books, articles, videos and podcasts. I must say that if I had started with The Intelligent Investor, I might not be a value investor today.

I read "The Intelligent Investor" years after I learned value investing. I found the book hard to read and if I was not a value investor, I would not have read it. Many times I felt like falling asleep.

This is not a book I would recommended to any newbie wanting to learn value investing. There are better books nowadays that presents the value investing concepts better.

Besides if you want to learn value investing, there are 3 skills you have to develop.

• how to analyze companies. This is like a mini-MBA course and I am sure there are better books for this than the Intelligent Investor.
• how to value them. Damodaran and Penman have much comprehensive books.
• how to mitigate risk from a permanent loss of capital perspective. I have not found any books on this and what I am doing is based on my own experience.

So you can understand why I said that "The Intelligent Investor" is not meant for the newbies. If covers how to analyze stocks and bonds in those days when not many people were doing fundamental analysis. If you do such analysis today, you won't get any edge. But the concept of having to do fundamental analysis and having a margin of safety is correct.

I would recommend Andy Tanner, The Four Pillars of Investing