Investment-management

I enjoyed this book by William Berstein. The fact that John Bogle selected The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building A Winning Portfolio as the best investment book for 2002, I unhesitantly went out, bough it and absorbed it.

Some of the key points are:

The Art and Science of mixing different asset classes into an effective blend.

The dangers of actively picking stocks, as opposed to investing in the whole market.

Behavorial finance and how state of mind can adversely affect decision making.

Why the mutual fund and brokerage industries instead of being your partners, are often your most direct competitors.

Strategies for managing all of your assets---savings, 401 (k)s,
home equity --- as one portfolio.

William Bernstein says it best; "The overarching message of this book is at once powerful and simple: With relatively little effort, you can design and assemble an investment portfolio that, because of it's wide diversification and minimal expence, will proove superior to most professionally m managed accounts. Great intelligence and good luck are not required. The essential characteristics of the succcessful investor are the discipline and stamina...stay the course."

Investing is a journey not a destination lined with stockbrokers, journalists, and mutual fund companies whose interests are diametrically opposed to yours. The Four Pillars of Investing shows you how to ignore distractions, stay the course, and determine your own financial direction with the sole goal of building long-term wealth for yourself and your family.

The Four Pillars of Investing provides an easy, step by step program for achieving long-term investing success. Highly recommended.

Right up front, I read Bernstein's first book and thought it was a classic. However, it wasn't a huge market success which the author admits for many reasons but it was/is still a fine book (The Intelligent Asset Allocator).

Now Bernstein comes back with an even better book from the standpoint of being readable for just about any kind or type of investor, experienced or inexperienced. The math and the charts are still there but with less rigorous emphasis. ...

The Four Pillars of Investing is both a historical review of investment success and failure with a very honest discussion of risk and reward. The pillars are the theory of investing, the history of investing, the psychology of investing (which is now recognized as a critical component in understanding why we invest the way we do) and finally, the business of investing. BTW, the humor in many of these chapters has not been lost either. I don't think your favorite stock broker or investment pro is necessarily going to enthusiastically recommend that you read this book.

Much of what is in the new book should be almost automatic wisdom/rules for investors but as we all know, we usually stray far and wide from good advice and common sense. In this post high-tech bubble collapse period, some solid review of investment principles is necessary. Call it back to basics if you will. It's just that Bernstein backs it up with the data to prove his points.

What really makes this book different from the first book (for me personally) is that Bernstein has finally put the portfolio construction recipe on paper in Chapter 13 called Defining Your Mix.

And now a special message to parents of high school and college graduates: buy them a copy of this book. Don't worry if they don't read it now. Or if they look at you strangely. For those that do read it, they'll be ten to twenty years ahead of their peers in investment wisdom and hopefully, financial security. And that's really what this book is all about; not how to trade or gamble on market timing but rather on how to use sound principles of investing to manage/understand risk while builiding a solid foundation of assets for the longer term.

This book is for everyone from the novice investor to the most savvy investor. The author does a wonderful job of explaining concepts and ideas without getting caught up in a bunch of analytical data and graphs. I wish this book had been published when I was much younger. All young people justing getting started in the work world should take the time to read this book. It will definitely help you later. Definitely worth the time to read this book!

Given that four out of the five reviews for this book are duplicates, I'd tend to favor the fifth, which wasn't very complimentary.

Like dB I havent read the book either. It was however strongly recommended by a reader (Threei) on the Elite Trader board who had read it as a solution to discipline problems.

Also, unlike Mike Covell who wrote another book that is reviewed here and gets Amazon to remove all non-complimentary reviews of his book at least this author leaves them up~!!!

This is a very good book for what it does. It introduces novices to the common mistakes futures investors make. Many more experienced option investors may find this book too simple for their taste. That would be unfortunate. Often times where more experienced investors falter is by dismissing the importance of fundamental information.

Mr. Kaeppel delivers that here. I have been involved with futures for almost 12 years. In that time I have caught myself committing any one of the "four biggest mistakes". Even throughout the years, after writing three books on futures and option investing, available on amazon.com, coI have had to catch myself in my trading.

This book is an easy read and will definitely add to your knowledge base if you are a novice. The more experienced will find this a welcome refinement to their trading style.

Sherden sets out to do what no one else seems to want to -- evaluate people who make predictions based on the accuracy of their predictions. And with a few exceptions, the evaluation is very much "thumbs down."

What Sherden doesn't do is tell us why people continue to believe predictions, and why billions of dollars continue to be spent based on predictions that aren't any better than throwing darts. But that's a good topic for another book.

This book is absolutely required reading for anyone who wonders whether stock analysts or economists really know what the future holds. The answer is simple: they don't.

The Fortune Sellers is an extremely well researched and written book for anyone who prepares or uses forecasts. This book reviews forecasting: weather, science, stock market, population, business, and futurology. This book is essential reading for anyone who should understand the limits of predicating the future. "Make a plan, work the plan, and keep your eyes and ears open."

Sherden has written a great book with only one flaw.

He doesn't attempt to get too theoretical as to why prediction is hard. He just looks at the evidence and finds that it is so. None of the predictions that regularly fill newspapers, business books, government economic forecasts, stock-market guides are demonstrably better than tossing a coin. This is a crucially important message as the consequences of believing a duff forecast are enormous. Better to recognise the uncertainty and plan to be flexible.

I'm surprised at the negative comments from reviewers who wanted some analytical framework to deal with all this. This smacks of those who respond to uncertainty by demanding a more precise forecast. The first step for most people is to recognise how worthless forecasting is.

I work with businesses relying on forecasts and I've found Sherden's book invaluable at shifting their thinking. I don't expect Sherden to provide solutions; thats my job.

The only flaw in the book is that Sherden does not differentiate enough between the predictable and the unpredictable components of the future. There is some good thinking on this in the literature on scenario planning (but Sherden's fundamental thesis stands: most important things are not inherently predictable).