I’ll start off by saying that this book was not meant for audio. It probably would have been a better experience to read this one than to listen to it. There were way too many numbers read off that could easily be glossed over as a reader, but as a listener, I heard every one of them. In this somewhat modern update, I also heard every URL spelled out which had the tendency of making my brain shut off. I was hoping to get a lot of concepts from this book and the format definitely hurt my ability to absorb it.
Some of the content is still quite good and will likely be relevant in perpetuity. Buy low and sell high. That’s the real rub of it. Don’t buy a stock because it’s already gone up, buy one that has gone down for no good reason. The author is a big fan of doing your research and actually understanding the numbers in the financial statements behind the stocks. Those numbers can help guide you to whether or not the company has a good future and if the stock is currently under valued or over valued. He does go through many examples of pitfalls while looking at those statements. It’s certainly not as simple as seeing the earnings per share as that can be easily manipulated.
Having said that, his advice is generally to not play stock picker and instead get funds that track the market as a whole. Major diversification. He’s also generally a fan of some bonds in your portfolio, although he doesn’t typically like rules of thumb about what percentage of your portfolio should be bonds. He’s more of a buy bonds when they’re cheap and buy stocks when they’re cheap. He’d also recommend averaging into stocks by setting aside the same amount of money every X months and putting that into the market. That way you never buy the top on accident and basically always buy at an average price.
The book does go through a lot of examples from the 70s, which felt like it should have been cut and replaced with newer examples. It also included early 2000s examples which were a bit more interesting to me, but still too many examples for my taste and not enough focus on the theory.
I think there’s some good, but very common (at this point), information being given out in this book. However, it’s not like people follow that advice or else there would be no boom and bust cycle or a very muted one. So as a book, it’s a nice reminder about what you really should be looking for in investing. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines, it might give you that boost of confidence to go in to some relatively safe waters. Just go for the real thing, not the audiobook.