Every Shareholder Should Read This Now

• Report this Comment On June 13, 2009, at 11:23 AM, reader777 wrote:

  ."wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

  I have not read the book by Marquez, and hopefully you did not take the qoute out of context, because it would take a complete ignoramous to make such a comment and a worse ignoramous like the author of this article to report it as if by itself it has any meaning. Take your father's lead and read some more, this time try to understand what you read before you put it in print.

• Report this Comment On June 13, 2009, at 6:11 PM, MartinLois wrote:

  reader77,

  Please read Marquez before you post a comment to others. I think it's so right in the articles.

  http://top-stocks-market.blogspot.com

• Report this Comment On June 14, 2009, at 3:09 AM, bbdonnelson wrote:

  The gem here is not about the time line of gaining insight as dad did, it is "make the most of these hard times by reading everything you can and learning as much as possible". That is solid advice for the entire life span.

  Assuming the advice (read and learn) is adhered to, I caution everyone on predicating future performance/investment entirely on the past studied. My gut says the investing world after the 08-09 adjustment will not be the same. Know your company, buy when you feel it is under-valued, set your threshold and sell without regret if the threshold is met. Repeat.

  Consider your world's worst case scenario; don't invest anything you cannot afford to loose in midst of that ill fated frame work. It takes patience and guts to adhere to these simple suggestions.

• Report this Comment On June 16, 2009, at 5:31 PM, truthisntstupid wrote:

  "Free Cash Flow" by George C. Christy

  Explains in detail how to see through what he calls "the accounting fog machine."

  Points out the serious flaws in accrual accounting according to GAAP and how thwy often serve more to confuse and disguise the true financial condition of a company rather than reveal it.

  THE BEST $50 you'll ever spend. Been seeing it in Barnes & Noble for months. Glad I finally bit the bullet. It's worth the money.

  I'm a dividend investor. I want to be able to tell how well a company can meet its financial obligations before I make the decision to become one OF its financial obligations.

  A WHOLE BOOK on "uncooking" the damn books!

• Report this Comment On June 25, 2009, at 10:13 PM, Andy00451 wrote:

  This is a great article by Austin Edwards!

  On what other financial web site would you get a recommendation to read a great novel like Love in the Time of Cholera? Also, the best books about

  investing are also fine reads, though it would be foolish

  to expect reading them will make you any serious

  green stuff. I lot of people who have read them are

  now as poor as church mice. In fact, many of these

  writers might be in that category too. I'll bet they made more money from publishing their books than

  in investing in stocks. Also, don't Tom and Dave

  make more money from running this site than in their

  personal investment decisions? Seems like this

  must be the case . . . eh, friends?

  The journalism on the Motley Fool website has

  always been top notch. If you like it because

  it's entertaining and fun, then the thirty minutes

  you spend on the site is well worth it. But don't

  expect that reading stuff here will make you rich.

  The purpose of the site is to make the owners rich,

  and not the readers. The Motley Fool's first Rule

  Breaker list had to be cancelled for a few years

  because it was such a joke. This "long term" port-

  folio got crushed at the turn of the century, and

  the majority of their stock picks got smoked. An

  Iggy Pop quote may be relevant here: "Look into

  the crater when the dust is clearing from it later."

  Tom and Dave are terrific journalists, business

  owners, and talk show hosts. But does any one

  really believe they can see into the future? Unless

  you can do this on a consistent basis, you chances

  of making money in the market are very slim. Pick-

  ing a stock that will go up, is like listening to a

  thousand new songs before they hit the air waves,

  and figuring out which ones will be the biggest hits.

  The alchemy of being able to do this is beyond the

  ability of our most powerful computers.

  The best time to invest is at the beginning of a per-

  iod of irrational exuberance. During a long, ten year

  run of such a period, the five star stocks go up al-

  most every day, lots of money can be made very

  quickly, and your winners beat your losers by two to

  one, so your risk taking is continuously rewarded.

  Every hundred years, we get two of these special

  periods if we're lucky. Call me when the next one

  starts please. The last one was pretty awesome!

  I think the next such period could start in thirty or

  forty years. This is great news really, because

  it means we'll have lots of time to read. This month,

  while I've been waiting, I'm thinking about rereading

  Waiting for Godot by Beckett. The books that I've

  actually read in June so far are Buy*ology: The

  Truth and Lies about Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom;and Time and Materials by Robert Hass [Pulitzer Prize Winner and National Book Award Winner in poetry]. The first of these books is about

  the new science of "neuromarketing". This was a

  fascinating and fun book. The second book was

  simply sublime. I'm currently reading Proust Was

  A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer and also Life and

  Fate by Vasily Grossman. These are both fabulous

  books. The Lehrer book is about how great writers

  have intuited in their work the current wave of discoveries made by brain researchers in recent

  years. The novel by Grossman, a Russian-Jewish

  writer, is a historical novel about the World War II

  period that has the epic sweep of War and Peace

  by the Count. That's Count Tolstoy, not Count Dracula, but who's counting? The publisher claims

  on the jacket that this book is the greatest Russian

  novel of the 20th century. The publisher could be

  right.

  Thanks for your article and your book recommendations Austin! Write on!!

  Andy00451

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