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vhindy's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Great book and definitely would recommend. It is centered more around the philosophy of investing and what makes for a successful investing career that will span decades.
I constantly found myself writing down notes of wisdom that I will carry with me in my investing journey.
Marks writes in a way that can make a dry subject appear engaging and easy to understand. That being said, he doesn’t dive into formulas but provides you with his insights into the human psychology that prevents an average investor from succeeding and how you, if you can resist it, can get superior results.
I would say this book is for people who have a baseline knowledge on security analysis and a beginning investor would get more from it if they waited until they became more familiar with valuing securities themselves.
I constantly found myself writing down notes of wisdom that I will carry with me in my investing journey.
Marks writes in a way that can make a dry subject appear engaging and easy to understand. That being said, he doesn’t dive into formulas but provides you with his insights into the human psychology that prevents an average investor from succeeding and how you, if you can resist it, can get superior results.
I would say this book is for people who have a baseline knowledge on security analysis and a beginning investor would get more from it if they waited until they became more familiar with valuing securities themselves.
yates9's review against another edition
3.0
Great ideas for a past generation of finance and investment.
Frustrating blog detived format would have been so mich better if rewritten as a book.
Frustrating blog detived format would have been so mich better if rewritten as a book.
maxstone98's review against another edition
4.0
I'm giving it 4 stars because I think that is probably objectively what it deserves, but really I was disappointed in this book, since I love Howard Marks' investment letters and had high expectations for a 5 star read.
This book is based on his investment memos. That's a good thing, since that is where he has collected his (very significant) investment wisdom over the years. And there are some good aspects of that, mostly that he can try to organize the many thoughtful things he has written into a single book representing what he thinks is most important, in a logical order, etc.
But ultimately I think the memos themselves are significantly better. You can see that somewhat in the book, which includes extensive quotes from the memos, and those quotes are the best part of the book. But another reason is that the memos place those thoughts in an important context, the time and investment environment in which they were written. And they tended to do a better job of linking his general concepts to specific examples (basically whatever was going on at the time, that prompted him to write on that topic at that moment). So even though reading all his memos would not be as organized, I think it would ultimately be time better spent. they are all available on Oaktree's website, I believe.
One additional comment on the "Illuminated" version, which includes interspersed comments from Marks as well as other luminaries including Seth Klarman and Joel Greenblatt. These make the book worse! For starters it is probably very hard to improve an existing text with interspersed comments. Second, they are not long enough to be interesting (if one of them wrote a few pages in response to some thought in the book, that would have been much more interesting I believe). Third, they interrupt the flow of the book (that could have been solved by making them footnotes instead of breaking up the text with them). And finally, many of the comments are essentially applause ("well said!" "this is a particularly important point!" "Marks really hits the nail on the head with this paragraph!" etc...). Not every commentator does that equally (Klarman and Greenblatt do less of it) but it really give the book a weird vibe, like it has a piped in applause track. I recommend the non-illuminated version.
All that said, I think Howard Marks is smart/wise/thoughtful/perceptive/learned and this book is worth reading. It just isn't as great as his 5-star memos.
This book is based on his investment memos. That's a good thing, since that is where he has collected his (very significant) investment wisdom over the years. And there are some good aspects of that, mostly that he can try to organize the many thoughtful things he has written into a single book representing what he thinks is most important, in a logical order, etc.
But ultimately I think the memos themselves are significantly better. You can see that somewhat in the book, which includes extensive quotes from the memos, and those quotes are the best part of the book. But another reason is that the memos place those thoughts in an important context, the time and investment environment in which they were written. And they tended to do a better job of linking his general concepts to specific examples (basically whatever was going on at the time, that prompted him to write on that topic at that moment). So even though reading all his memos would not be as organized, I think it would ultimately be time better spent. they are all available on Oaktree's website, I believe.
One additional comment on the "Illuminated" version, which includes interspersed comments from Marks as well as other luminaries including Seth Klarman and Joel Greenblatt. These make the book worse! For starters it is probably very hard to improve an existing text with interspersed comments. Second, they are not long enough to be interesting (if one of them wrote a few pages in response to some thought in the book, that would have been much more interesting I believe). Third, they interrupt the flow of the book (that could have been solved by making them footnotes instead of breaking up the text with them). And finally, many of the comments are essentially applause ("well said!" "this is a particularly important point!" "Marks really hits the nail on the head with this paragraph!" etc...). Not every commentator does that equally (Klarman and Greenblatt do less of it) but it really give the book a weird vibe, like it has a piped in applause track. I recommend the non-illuminated version.
All that said, I think Howard Marks is smart/wise/thoughtful/perceptive/learned and this book is worth reading. It just isn't as great as his 5-star memos.
gidazz's review against another edition
Um livro repetitivo que poderia ter, no máximo, 30 páginas.