I was pleased to see that Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund included a couple of investing books within his “23 Books That Changed My Life” (May 12, 2017) that I happened to have on my shelf. John Train’s Famous Financial Fiascos is one of them. I serendipitously found several Train books at the Friends of S.F. public library’s massive annual sale years ago as a recent grad going through the obligatory investment learning cycle (e.g. books by the Gardner brothers, founders of The Motley Fool — Housel was previously with MF — progressing to Train and Benjamin Graham — I found Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor waiting for me at the same book sale, and thankfully had the latter to lean on before taking the plunge on the former). I have written about Train a few times over the years.
Investing Books
Robert Hagstrom’s Investing: The Last Liberal Art, is another solid Housel pick. Hagstrom’s The Detective and The Investor (not on Housel’s list) is also worth a spot on the investor’s shelf. Both are very enjoyable reads, the latter especially paired with some detective classics.
In the photo above of some titles I pulled off my shelf, I included David Dreman’s Contrarian Investment Strategy, which was published in 1979. Like Ben Graham’s “Mr. Market” from a few decades before Dreman’s work, a lot of the behavioral/psychological ideas that have become more mainstream in recent years were well known long ago.
“There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.” — Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
P.S. While the links above include Amazon affiliate links to support this site, I obviously high recommend visiting your local (or college) library and library sales. Give the inter-college lending a try, too, to expand your scale of finds to include foreign languages. Don’t pass up the library sales and if you happen to be in the S.F. area (I’ve also been to some good ones near Princeton and some of the larger cities on the East Coast)!
