Book Review: The Little Book of Market Wizards by David Merkel, CFA of The Aleph Blog
Over time, I have reviewed a decent number of “Little Books.” I have a theory as to why I like some of them, and not others. I like the ones that take a relatively narrow concept and summarize it. An example of that would be Mark Mobius’ book on emerging markets, or Vitaliy Katsenelson’s book on sideways markets.
But when a concept is broad and not friendly to summary, a “little book” is not so useful. As examples, John Mauldin’s book on Bulls Eye Investing went too many directions, and Scaramucci on Hedge Funds could not adequately summarize or describe a large topic.
There are other “Little Books” that I have read that did not even get a review… probably about 10% of the books I read in entire never get the review written because they were so bad, or just hard to decide what the book was. (What do you want to be if you grow up dear? )
Sorry, too much intro. For those at Amazon, there are useful links at my blog.
Jack Schwager is generally a good writer, and expert at talking with clever investors in order to break down the main points of how they invest (without giving away the store). In this “The Little Book of Market Wizards” he goes a different direction, and looks for commonalities among various clever investors, with each chapter covering a different topic.
My view is that most clever investors fall into one of a bunch of categories, much of which boils down to time horizon for the preferred investment. Going down the continuum: day trader, swing trader, longer-term trader, momentum-oriented growth investor, growth investor, growth-at-a-reasonable-price investor, and value investor. After that, you might differentiate between those that go for relative vs absolute returns.
As such, The Little Book of Market Wizards posits a bunch of topics that apply to different groups of clever investors. I think it would have been better to have segmented the book by classes of investors, because then you could have a coherent set of commonalities for each main investor type.
As it is, The Little Book of Market Wizards relies heavily on anecdotes, which isn’t entirely a bad thing; nothing motivates a topic like a story. But if you were reading this to try to develop your own philosophy of managing money in order to fit your own personality, you might have a hard time doing it with this book. I think you would be better off reading one of Schwager’s longer books, and reading about each clever investor separately. At least then you get to see the full package for an investor, and how the different aspects of investing in a given style work together.
Quibbles
Already expressed.
Summary
If you just want a taste of what a wide variety of different investors do to be effective, this could be the book for you. For most other people, get one of Schwager’s longer books, and read about the different investors as individual chapters. If you still want to buy it, you can buy it here: The Little Book of Market Wizards: Lessons from the Greatest Traders.
Full disclosure: I received a copy from the author’s PR flack.
If you enter Amazon through my site, and you buy anything, I get a small commission. This is my main source of blog revenue. I prefer this to a “tip jar” because I want you to get something you want, rather than merely giving me a tip. Book reviews take time, particularly with the reading, which most book reviewers don’t do in full, and I typically do. (When I don’t, I mention that I scanned the book. Also, I never use the data that the PR flacks send out.)
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