I’ve really been getting into the mental models Charlie Munger has talked about so much. After you learn a new model, it stays deep in your head and can be applied to many situations in the future. While others look at a problem or a question in isolation, those with mental models can apply a number of different tools to the situation, offering superior insight. A great book I read recently was The Innovator’s Dilemma by...
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Taken Oct. & Nov. 2012 by Kyle Mowery, Founder of GrizzlyRock Capital, notes from The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards Heuer, Jr. Chapter 1: “Thinking About Thinking” Thinking analytically is a skill learned via doing (page 2) Some of the CIA’s best analysts leaned through failures early in their careers (page 2) The concept of bounded rationality means that we create simplified mental models, which are inherently more simple than reality (page 3) “Intelligence analysts...
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This book is written by a man who wants to see the European experiment succeed, but is not confident that it will succeed. I think this is a fair book on the topic; it does not absorb all of my biases on why I think the Eurozone is hopeless: a) Currency unions have never worked; they must either become a nation, or break up. b) I have a saying, “Governments are smaller than Economies,...
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There is more money to be lost than made in most controversial IPOs, on average. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good book, and the author knows what she is talking about, but whether one should buy Facebook in its IPO next month is a huge open question, and I would encourage you to read this book to think through the problem. If you read the book, you will get a healthy dose...
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I previously reviewed The Most Important Thing. Great book, but can a great book be made better? Yes, but only by a little bit. The illumination of this book comes from comments from Christopher Davis, Joel Greenblatt, Paul Johnson and Seth Klarman, an estimable bunch of investors and investment thinkers. Howard Marks offers a few more comments as well. None of the comments are bad, but also, none of them disagree with Howard Marks. ...
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Some of my favorite online videos are physics lectures by Walter Lewin of MIT. They’re posted at MIT OpenCourseWare and Academic Earth, and they’re brilliant. Lewin is an incredible teacher who’s passionate about the beauty of physics and its power as a way of looking at the world. He really brings science to life. One of his famous classroom demonstrations, which is on video, involves a pendulum that you think is going to hit him...
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http://gregspeicher.com/ I just finished reading Peter Cundills biography There’s Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach. It’s the story of a great investor who lived life on his own terms and who had a great joie de vivre. The book contains seven timeless investing lessons. 1. Follow your passion with conviction and success will follow. Cundill discovered Ben Graham after knocking around in the dark for several years and that was it. He...
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I have decided to do book reviews on some select accounting books. The most recent book I have read is Financial Statements by Thomas Ittelson. Ittelson has an interesting bio for someone who writes a book on accounting. According to the book “Thomas R. Ittelson is a scientist, businessman, author and teacher with many years of hands-on experience in business development and marketing for technical companies. As a consultant to entrepreneurs, Ittelson has written...
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This is my ninth book review on the Financial Crisis. To see my previous book reviews view my previous articles. My Most recent Book is TitledToo Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System by Robert Pozen. Robert Pozen has worked in numerous roles in the Government and private Sector. He is currently chairman of MFS Investment Capital, which manages more than $170 billion in assets for mutual funds and pension plans. He is...
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Seth Klarman and Joel Greenblatt have a lot of things in common. They both are extremely successful value investors who have a long record of beating the market by wide margins. Both are widely followed in the value investing community and are very popular on GuruFocus. Both of them run large and successful hedge funds. One last similarity between the two is the both are excellent authors. Joel Greenblatt wrote two books, the more...
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