Book reading

All the books I have there on the right are books I have read, are reading, or intend to read. As I discover/read new books I will link to them and once read will provide a quick book review focusing on what I got out of the book as a new investor.

Essentially what I am trying to do over the next year or so is to develop an understanding of investing in general. Simply put I am sorta of creating a one year course on value investing. So far I am trying to focus on books that are general in nature, books about the stock market, bio's on investors, etc.

My next set of books I plan on reading will focus on how to find a good comapnies to buy, what to look for and what to watch out for.

Eventually once I feel I have read enough books to create a model of reading I will post a sequential book reading process.

I will most likely end up reading more books than I need to (good thing I like reading though) and so my ultimate goal is to help others focus in on what I feel are the essential books.

For now I will just put up books as I read them with some comments.

Right now I am reading this book



it is a very good book. I am about a 25% through it. Essentially this book covers the last 300 years and discusses periods where there was "mania" in the markets (essentially defining mania as the appreciation of stock prices with no connection to underlying value).

The book starts a bit slow mostly because it deals with markets from 300 years ago, but I expect that once it gets to more modern markets (last 150 years or so) it will prove more interesting because of the fact that this is the period of the modern stock market as well as better record keeping to illustrate the points.

Essentially I expect that the overriding value I will take from this book is that those individuals who can best divorce themselves form emotional impluses will be most succesful over the long term because they will avoid the loss of capital when the mania of a market subsides.

Once I finish with the book I will of course go into more detail (I am begining to get into the habit of marking parts of the book which may a interesting point so I will be able to provide better reviews than what I have provided to date.).

Steven