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Reddit mentions of The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition)

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We found 198 Reddit mentions of The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition). Here are the top ones.

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition)
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Found 198 comments on The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition):

u/Blahkbustuh · 3274 pointsr/investing

This sort of thing is like getting hit by lightning.

Imagine this: if you were around in the early 1900's, which car company would you have invested in? There were hundreds of them. Most of them looked pretty good. Even as late as the 1950's Studebaker, Nash, and American Motors would have looked pretty great. You would have no way of knowing Ford, GM, and Chrysler would have been the survivors and good investments.

Moreover, you don't remember it, but in the late 90's Apple was totally on life support. I think it was either Microsoft or Bill Gates tossed them some help, it was so bad. Steve Jobs came back and turned the whole mess around. If your dad had invested in them in 1986, he'd have sold it within 10 years and been happy to have walked away with more than $0.

Moreover #2, the late 90's was the tech boom. Look up some info on Pets.com. Yahoo was the internet titan. AOL was everywhere and bought Time Warner. Dell Computers were huge. Compuserve. The 90's was the same thing as cars in the early 1900's. You had no way of knowing out of all the tech companies that Amazon and Google were going to be the survivors.

You know how Amazon basically used the internet to eat Sears' lunch? That means smart and connected people fully immersed in the retail industry running the biggest retail business in the world and able to afford all the consultants and research they could want couldn't even comprehend what technology was going to do within a decade or two or spot what was going to be their downfall and you think you could have managed to pick Amazon out of all the tech companies at the same time?

Moreover #3, the places where there are spectacular opportunities, they occur to people around the founder and early employees and people in the venture capital industry. You'd had to have known Mark Zuckerberg in college or his parents and been able to lend a nerd with a computer $50k, or been an early employee of a "shaky" at best company. That's the risk you run if you go to work for a startup. If you have claim to a percent or two, if the company takes off, that's huge. But way more likely the company probably flops or gets bought out for a modest amount. Are you friends with college tech nerds? Are they working on stuff that you think giving them $10k's wouldn't be throwing money away? Do your relatives know their relatives? Are you in an area where you'd come into contact with those people?

Additionally, I'm 32. Part of getting older is realizing you've made choices and decisions and they create opportunities and paths and take away other opportunities and paths, and learning how to cope with seeing that you should have done something differently. We're all doing the best we can at the time. If any of our parents had bought $10k or 20k worth of Apple or Microsoft in the 90's they'd be millionaires by now. If my parents had bought a different house on a lake in the same town for a slightly higher price 30 years ago, they'd be in significantly different financial position too. If only my grandfather had bought large amounts of land near where he lived Washington DC during the Great Depression! You made the best decisions at the time, don't live life looking in the rear view mirror and second guessing yourself.

Looking at my situation, I could buy a flashy car that I like and would enjoy a lot or I could take that few hundred per month and invest it. What happens when I'm 60 and have an account with a big number in it? Then I buy the car I'd enjoy having and go on a lot of vacations, except I'll be old. And I don't expect suddenly when I'm older, my feelings will switch around and I'd suddenly start to enjoy spending money and seeing the number go down rather than saving it. And I've talked to my coworkers, a decade ago there was a person in the office where I work now was mid-50's and came down with brain cancer and was rapidly gone. We have other coworkers who die right after retiring, or aren't healthy enough to get much enjoyment. Think about that--you or me could spend our whole working lives saving money for retirement and then die in our 50's or right after retiring and not being able to get any enjoyment from it. And it's not just dying, but coming down with an illness or having a lot of pain. That isn't a very enjoyable life.

And yet I'd rather save money and push that problem out of what to do with it. This is what I think about when I think about whether to get rid of my cheap, working, boring car and consider getting something fun.

I think autonomous vehicles will be a large source of growth in the coming decade. So which company do you think will do it first? Ford, GM, Chrysler, or Tesla? What if Apple or Google or Uber or Yahoo or some company you haven't heard of right now swoops in and does it first? Surprise! You chose wrong. You could redeem yourself if you invested in a car company the tech company chooses to partner with because they know how to tech but not to make cars. Which car company would they partner with? Is it the one you chose?

Healthcare is big. It's 17% of our economy. How do you invest in that for 10 years for now? What if the people start electing progressives and they completely rearrange the healthcare system and do something like eliminate the need for insurance companies or sharply reduce the profitability of pharmaceutical companies?

Don't dwell on hindsighting yourself. If you look at any graph of a stock or anything it is sooooo obvious to spot the times to buy or sell and pick an optimum path through different investments but when you have to do it live you never know what is going to happen. If you had $10k now, do you think you'd invest it right now or do you think we're on the cusp of a recession where if you hang on to that sum for part of a year or more, you can get a much larger return? What do you think, hmm? It'll be so easy to be able to see what you should have done when you're 32 in 2029 and pull up a graph of stocks and what they did in 2019-20.

I don't want to be rude but stop it with the crypto. You know how gambling works because it exploits people who have the inclination in them to say 'just one more for sure!' even with games where the odds are actually pretty low to ever come out ahead. The fear of missing out is what compels people to get involved with it. People who say "If I had put $100 into bitcoin in 2011, I'd have $10 billion now!" like, no. It's exploiting the people like you who want to look at the graph of Apple's stock price and say "if I had bought in '86...". Also last week the Fed announced it's working on developing a peer to peer live payment system--you know one that will use real actual money so actual real people will be able to use it. That is going to diminish the real world use crypto claims to have. Canada already has a system like this and I don't know if European countries do as well.

Read this book, pup.

Basically monthly I buy the S&P 500 index. It's a trade off between how much return I want and how much effort I want to put in. I doubt I'll beat skyscrapers of people with PhD's who are experts in this, know accounting, read boring reports and do all sorts of research, and actually talk directly to the people running companies so I buy the index and won't ever be worse than the market as a whole--which the skyscrapers of people can't consistently beat. I own some other company's stocks separately, like a railroad, an industrial conglomerate, and Google and all three of those have done great. In that book I linked to, a section talks about how you can approximate the market performance with like owning any 25-30 random companies' stocks--because he's from a time before there were actual market indexes you can hold. Lately I've been starting to think that you can probably beat the market if you avoid the obvious loser or stagnant companies that are big enough to be part of the S&P 500. Like just buying and holding blue chips like McDonald's or Coke or IBM or Disney for multiple years will probably beat the S&P 500. You won't get rich enough to be able to retire at 35 that way, something like what Apple did, but you'll come out pretty solid in the long run. At the same time, so like I own say $10k of Google. If the company doubles, now I have $20k. Big whoop. Now I can retire. If the company 10x, I'll have $100k. That's even better but I still can't retire from that. The big companies can't grow so much--how would Google or Apple double in size from where they are now? Apple would have to completely invent a whole new industry again (and it'd have to be like actual AI or something nutty like teleportation). And if any one knew what that was going to be, they'd have done it already. We have RFID tags now and have had them for over 10 years yet stores still would rather pay cashiers than have customers simply walk through an RFID detector.

The next stuff to come is going to be connected with faster internet and reducing labor. Drones and getting rid of human drivers? E-doctor video visits?

u/RishFush · 61 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Rich Dad Poor Dad catches a lot of flak, but it's actually really good at teaching the absolute basics in an easy-to-follow manner. Like, learn what a Cash Flow Statement is, increase your asset column, learn basic accounting language, separate emotions and money, minimize taxes. Just glean the overall principles he's teaching and don't blindly follow his specific strategies.

The Richest Man in Babylon is another great, easy to read, investing 101 book.

And The Millionaire Next Door is a research-based book on Millionaires in America and what kind of habits and mindsets got them to their current wealth. It's a wonderfully refreshing read after being brainwashed by tv and movies saying that millionaires won it or stole it and live lavish lives. Most actual millionaires are pretty frugal and hard working with modest lives.

---
And here are some resources to help you learn all the new words and concepts:

u/zorts · 57 pointsr/investing

Your question assumes that you are buying low, and selling high very frequently. Day traders attempt to do this. Algorithms attempt to do this with thousands of trades per day (if not per minute). These strategies require vast amounts of data in order to operate. An individual investor has no hope of buying low and selling high in a fraction of a second to make a profit. Mostly because they cannot afford to spend the time gathering the information.

So how do regular people make a profit on the stock market? The less time you have to spend gathering data, the longer you have to wait to take a profit. Fortunately waiting also means that trading expenses are few and far between. However to make any money on the stock market you MUST spend some time learning. (OR you have to pay someone like me to do that for you, I'm a Registered Representative).

The recommended reading section (to the left of the screen) is a great place to start. Begin at the bottom with Bogleheads Guide, and work you way up to Intelligent Investor. II is a great book, but it's written for people who have taken at least a Financial Accounting class or two. So if you haven't or are unwilling to take a course start with Bogleheads, which is written for just about anyone.

If you don't want to take the time to read all those books (please run screaming from the market now, if you are unable or unwilling to learn about it), I'll sum them up for you in the way that I do with my own clients.

You need two things. A Plan and a Skill. The plan I like to use comes from Jack Bogle via the Bogleheads Guide and Bogleheads.org. The skill is recommended by Dan Sheridan (a commodities trader from the Chicago Exchange). Why a plan and a skill? Well because simply putting your money into VTSMX and letting it sit is doomed to failure. "Fire and Forget" is doomed to fail. There are psychological reasons. Humans are very susceptible to a herd mentality. Which leads to 'buy high, sell low'. There are emotional reason. When the market is tanking it HURTS emotionally. And there are negligence issues. People who dump money into an account are prone to forget about it. VTSMX is a fantastic fund, if you keep your eye on it. It's the worst fund in the world if you're not paying attention.

So what is the Plan? Right out of Jack Bogles playbook, the plan is:
"Take your age in bonds." I know, it sounds ludicrous to suggest to a 25 year old that they should have 25% of their funds in, say, VBMFX and 75% in VTSMX. That's way to conservative, right? They should be in 100% risk, right? Well no.

If you all you have is one position in stocks, you don't get to practice the skill! The Skill is critical and you need a second non-correlated fund. If your investment consists of a single fund, you have nothing to exchange with. There's nothing to practice. You need at least two funds to practice The Skill.

What is The Skill.
The first investing skill that you should learn is called 'rebalancing'. You do it at least once a year (more frequently if you can afford the additional costs, or are doing it in a retirement account). Every year on your birthday, you need to get 1% more conservative (see The Plan). So on that day you evaluate where you stocks and bonds are.

You started by investing 75/25, but over a year they will be completely different. The stock market should outpace the bond market. In a good year you could end up 90/10. In a bad stock market year you could end up 50/50. Regardless on the day you rebalance you sell off enough shares of the fund that is higher then it should be, and buy shares in the fund that is lower then it should be. After this transaction your risk is re-balanced from where ever the market took it, back to what it should be for you.

On your 26th birthday you should be 74/26. By re-balancing you have captured some gains (sold high), and have purchased some under-performers (bought low). Why is this better then say 'letting it ride' on the market? By doing this you prevent yourself from being fully susceptible to the market. 100% stock market position is a gamble. You are also making yourself more conservative over time. You are avoiding the high fee's of Target Return Date Funds. You are forcing yourself to monitor your investments, although not too frequently.

So have a plan. And practice a skill. A good plan that you could start with, but you don't have to, is:

Keep Costs Low (buy index or ETF)

Take your age in bonds

Re-balance at least yearly

Strongly consider doing this in a Tax Deferred retirement account (to keep costs low when you buy/sell/exchange shares)

This is how I make money on the stock market and the bond market, and the commodities market. This is not the only way to make money with investments.

u/Clint_Redwood · 47 pointsr/TheRedPill

First thing you have to do is learn all the lingo and jargon. Then you can learn the principles and strategies.

Investopedia is a fantastic place to get learn the lingo. Just search a word you don't understand and there will be a short article explaining it.

Then you can go two ways, learn pragmatic practices like Fundamental Investing vs Analytical Investing, Day Trading vs swing trading, stocks vs options trading, forex trading, etc.

Or you can study the grand scheme and mentality you need to become wealthy. From my experience you first need to have the mentality of a wealthy person before you can become wealthy. Like how TRP teaching you to be a certain way before you actually are. A good analogy is, "You don't meet any 80 year old people that are poor and great with their money". Just doesn't happen, your wealth is directly correlated to your behavior and outlook. Mentality and frivolous spending dictate your wealth, not how much your job pays you or your hourly wage. I know people making 100k a year that are fucking broke and will be broke the rest of their lives just because they don't care to learn how to use money.

I'd start with studying the most successful investors and businessmen ever. Learning how powerful compound investing is will probably be the most important thing. This is a great video over Warren buffett and his overarching mentality to investing. Study everything you can on him and how he "Thinks". He's mentality is what you need to learn and emulate.

The Intellegent Investor is probably the best primer book you'll ever read for investing. Its an extension to Buffetts mentality. The technicals will be over your head as a novice but pay attention to the mentality like buffett. It's written by a guy that entered the stock market in 1915 and survived through 5 recessions and is considered one of the best investing books ever written. It's one of the first books Warren Buffett ever read, he talks about it too in that video I linked. It's been updated every five years since it was written in the 70's. I'd suggest learning as much about Benjamin Graham, the author of this book, as you do Warren Buffett. Cause he's who Buffett learned from.


Now, once you get the mentality and lingo down you can focus on actual strategies and pragmatics. Financial Education youtube channel is a good place to learn fundemental investing. he's a bit goofy but he's solid on his delivery and takes a more modern approach to the buffett style of investing.

I'd recommend learning the basics of fundamental investing first. Learn how to read balance sheets, cash flow statements, income reports. Study market caps of companies, P/E Ratios, are they under or over valued, etc.

Once you have the basics of fundamental down then you can learn analytical. This is where you can make high returns on your investments but it is greater risk unless you learn how to manage them. Tons of people lose their ass in analytical because they don't know what they are doing. Educate yourself and don't be one of them. youtube the difference between day trade vs swing trade, momentum vs breakout trading, learn the difference between options and stocks, support and resistance lines, studies, indicators & signals.

That should be a good start.

edit Also Download the Robinhood app, it's the first free trading app ever. So you can literally start with $10 if you want and fuck around. the beauty of trading and investing is, it's not about the amount you start with. It's your % return per day, per month, per year. There are people day trading with 300%+ return in a month. They can take $50 and turn it into $15 or 5k and turn it into 15k. your return percent is the magic number, not how much you start with.

u/estuarineblue · 44 pointsr/UKPersonalFinance

Please do not do BTL. Far richer people and more savvy investors have done BTL and lost money.

You have a wonderful gift. £170K is an amazing windfall for you and your partner. Do not throw it away on a speculative investment, one that you do not know anything about -- can you tell me, in quantitative terms, how the housing market is doing, what are your rental yields (gross and net)? If you cannot, do not enter the BTL market as an investment.

My suggestion to you is to look to buying a flat for yourselves to stay in, and take the remaining funds and fill up your ISAs each year. Within your ISAs, you can invest in low cost tracker Index Funds. If this concept is alien to you, now is a good time to read up about this! A simple beginner book is [The Intelligent Investor] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661) by Benjamin Graham.

Alternatively, look at [Nutmeg] (https://www.nutmeg.com). This is a simple platform that you can put your money into ISAs.

To put into simple terms about what your £170K can bring you:

  1. You buy a small flat for £70K. You don't have to pay rent again.

  2. You put the remaining £100k into ISAs. Fill you and your partner's ISA up to the maximum of £20K per person each year. From your original Capital of £100K in investments index funds, you safely withdraw ~4% each year without touching the capital. This means, you can get £4000 each year RIGHT NOW without doing anything, for the rest of your life, like a permanent pension. OR, if you choose not to withdraw your money RIGHT NOW, you can GROW your capital for the future.

    I am not your financial advisor! But please read and think carefully about your next steps. You have been handed an opportunity of a lifetime.
u/UserNotFoundError666 · 42 pointsr/stocks

An hour a day devoted to learning about stocks is a solid plan. I would suggest that the very first book you read be "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham who was Warren Buffetts mentor at Columbia University and taught Buffett how to use the Value Investing approach https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

This is a dense read and you should approach it as if you were taking a course and studying for a final exam. Get yourself a notebook and write down all of that golden info buried in each chapter. Keep in mind this book was first written in 1949 and the format of it and the financial language may be difficult to get through but take your time, don't rush through it, take notes, highlight paragraphs, and absorb the information you'll be glad you did in the future.

​

Below is essentially a list of things I wish I could have told myself years ago in order to save a lot of heartache and lost money. Hopefully it helps you to avoid a lot of painful lessons that I learned the hard way.

  • Study "value investing" in depth. Ignore the people who say Value Investing doesn't work, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Joel Greenblatt, Peter Lynch, Mario Gabelli, Mohnish Pabrai, etc... have made fortunes buying companies at discounts using the value investing approach.
  • After reading The Intelligent Investor further educate yourself on value investing by reading about the above investors, some have written book themselves others have had many books written about them. Also checkout r/SecurityAnalysis
  • As a beginner invest heavily in a broad based index fund that cover the whole S&P500 (VTSAX, SPY, etc...) and only devote a small percentage of your portfolio at first to stocks you've selected until you get your feet wet.
  • Ignore the financial media at all costs (Mad Money, Fast Money, Squawk Box, basically everything on CNBC...) they will lead you down a dark path that mostly resembles gambling as opposed to investing.
  • Be in it for the long haul. Do not day trade. Find undervalued companies with great management teams that have been beaten up by the market and buy shares that you know should be valued at $50 on sale for $25 dollars when the conditions are right. As Buffett has said imagine that you have a punchcard that has 20 tickets and each time you buy a company a ticket gets punched all you get for your whole life is just those 20 companies. You would want to take your time and analyze each company to ensure you're making the right decision before you buy.
  • Don't spend 10 minutes even thinking about buying a companies shares unless you are comfortable enough with your decision to hold it for 10 years.
  • Do not trade options, futures, forex, etc.... as a beginner just stick with equities at first. Get some experience under your belt and then if you want to tred into these waters later do so, but with caution.
  • There are some decent financial advisors out there but there are also lot more not worth their salt. It's good to talk to them once in a while but take their advice with caution, no one will safeguard your money or care about it as much as you do. Also most of them get paid commissions for putting you into whatever investments will give them the highest commission so look for a "fee-only" advisor if you're going use one. Trust me your financial advisor will still sleep like a baby if he loses your entire life saving, how will you sleep though?
  • Pay no attention to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) this is some academic mumbo jumbo out of the University of Chicago that tries to make the case that markets are always efficient, it's been in most financial textbooks for decades and like most things learned in college is complete bullshit. Markets are very emotional and prone to all types of irrational behavior because well people are very emotional and irrational at times....especially when money is on the line.
  • Pay attention to large scale macro-economic conditions such as the current 10-2 year bond yield inversion that just happened a few days ago and has been a signal that has preceded the last 5 recessions. Usually a recession doesn't occur for 12-18 months out after the yields invert and there's no guarantee that it will happen just be aware of it and other macro economic indicators so you know where the economy is in the business cycle. This will allow you to take advantage of certain buying opportunities when prices are depressed.
  • Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
u/BeatElite · 34 pointsr/humblebundles

The last Willey "for dummies" series I got was the how to land an IT job one and most of them were easy to read and had some decent pointers. That being said I'm always skeptical on getting stock market books. I own The intelligent investor and also have listened to Money Management Skills on the great courses audible series and I can say that phrase I keep hearing the most is that "you can't beat the market".

The average person who goes on etrade or Robin hood doesn't have the same resources as those higher up do with computers that can process hundreds of trades in the blink of an eye or potential insider sources . We also get emotional over stocks and find it hard to disassociate ourselves from our losses and boast about our gains. Getting someone else to manage your portfolio is also costly and you can most likely get better gains as long as you diversify your stocks in a mutual index fund. That's just a bit of what I learned and I suggest getting those 2 books/audiobooks that I recommend. I still believe the dummies books will be good, but from what I read, you'll have much more stress trying to maximize gains individually actively rather than take a backseat in a well diversified portfolio

u/Zabren · 24 pointsr/financialindependence

> Even this seems a bit too aggressive for my taste

Your job for the next month or three is to become a sponge for financial knowledge. Even though you have a CPA and a CFP, in order for you to feel comfortable with their decisions with your money, you need to have some amount of knowledge with finance.

Read:

u/JimC29 · 20 pointsr/financialindependence

Take 5% of your money and try something else but I advise you to read the Intelligent Investor first. Benjamin Graham has been right for the past century and will be right for this one too. I add individual stocks during market downturns but keep 90% of my money in index funds.

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/vstky · 19 pointsr/stocks
u/whosdamike · 19 pointsr/Frugal

Wow, there is so much hate on stock investing here.

I recommend cross-posting to /r/personalfinance.

I think you picked a good mutual fund for someone with risk aversion. If she's that averse to talking about stocks, then I don't think a book will help - but if you'd like to understand the arguments better, the best introductory work on the subject is The Intelligent Investor.

I think education is the best tool here. There are a few critical points that she'll have to understand if she wants to accept investing as distinct from gambling:

  • Actually choosing individual stocks and profiting is exceedingly difficult, except for rare individuals with the time and skill necessary to do so.

  • Individual success and failure often falls into statistical noise. Like an infinite number of monkeys mashing typewriters, sometimes someone hits Shakespeare.

  • Regularly putting money into a balanced mutual fund is not the same as trying to pick stocks, time the market, or otherwise "beat the odds."

  • The "bet" you are making is that your allocation of stocks/bonds will accrue value over decades. This is an extremely solid bet... but it is not a guarantee.

  • What is a guarantee is that keeping your money as cash, and not investing it, will mean you lose value in the long run to inflation.

  • If you don't have the stomach to keep your money in the stock market during bad times, then you're stacking the deck against yourself. Getting out of the market at the low points is the same as selling low and buying high.

    And a final bit of advice you probably don't need: if everyone is telling you that something is guaranteed to give you a return, that is an excellent sign of a bubble.

    Past examples include tech stocks and real estate. You can make a strong case for gold, but as always, it's dangerous to try to predict the future.
u/chandler404 · 15 pointsr/personalfinance

I'm a HUGE fan of this book, and actually read it. The version I read had commentaries at the end of each chapter that were written a bit more recently, so it helped to make the book book feel current (it was written in the early 70s). (http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341621394&sr=8-1&keywords=benjamin+graham+investor)

I found it to be a comprehensive explanation of all the financial instruments I'd ever heard of, and explained clearly what they were and how they worked. It's kinda like having a rich uncle sit you down in his wood paneled office and explain to you how the financial world actually works.

It's not simplified, and it can be intimidating, but I'd highly recommend it.

u/throwbubba1 · 14 pointsr/investing

Read. All the famous investors started reading at a young age and read ferociously (ok maybe not all but most).

Go to the library if you can, they generally will have all the quality investing tomes, without some of the "get rich quick manuals" which only benefit the authors.

Here is a few books to start with:

u/Bulletproof_Haas · 14 pointsr/wallstreetbets

Realize that you always need to be learning and taking in new information. You will never "master" the market, nobody else has mastered it either, so take others' opinions with a grain of salt.


As much as people joke around here it can be a good way to spur new thought. If someone says the market will crash in 3 days? Why? Do you agree? If so, why? What data can you come up with to support that? (Etc, etc). Your goal should be to become knowledgeable enough to look at the economic landscape and come up with a personal opinion about what will happen next.

Once you have an informed hypothesis on what will occur then you make investments based on those convictions.


u/Kriegenstein · 13 pointsr/Bitcoin

Investing in cities via Municipal Bonds is the very essence of value investing, just on a scale that isn't related to a company.

The rest of your mess of a point has nothing to do with his investment philosophy. He makes money where he sees value. How he defines value would require a few weeks reading on your part, so get to work:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396646177&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor

u/Phyb3r_Optik · 11 pointsr/pennystocks

If you are new, it's very risky to take suggestions from random people on the internet. It could be a hit or miss, but a thorough read on books like Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is a good start to understanding the market. From there, you can gain a basic understanding of suggestions people give you to discern if it's a good buy or not. Buying stocks merely on speculation as you are doing now can be exciting as long as you are ok with losing your hard earned $300. Just be aware of the risk.

u/DustinEwan · 10 pointsr/investing

The answer, as usual is: it depends.

If you want to invest your money, then there's no better time than now. However, the implication is that when you invest that money you have to leave it sit long enough to do it's work.

At 19 and wanting to invest, you have time on your side. You need to be able to stomach volatility in the market and not get excited when your stocks rally for 30%, nor should you despair when the stocks plummet by 40%.

Traditionally speaking, the stock market averages between 6%~8% a year, which is much better than any savings account you're going to find. However, you shouldn't treat it as a savings account because volatility will almost certainly put you in a bad position to sell whenever you need the money most.

If you feel like you can stomach that volatility and turn a blind eye to both the rallies and collapses, then the stock market may certainly be for you. If you are NOT looking to place your money in good companies for a long period of time (10+ years), then it's my opinion that you are simply speculating... in which case you may as well go to the casino.

If at this point you have decided that you would like to invest in the stock market, you now need to figure out the degree of involvement you would like to dedicate.

If you're looking for a simple hands off investment, then you should just invest in an index fund such as VFINX, SWPPX, or QQQ.

Index funds closely track the performance of the market and charge minimal fees. They are pretty much totally hands off on your part, and are the Ronco of stock investing. Just set it and forget it, and enjoy your ride on the market.

A step above that are mutual funds. They actively try to beat indexes, but charge a fee to do so. There are mutual funds for any style of investing, and people tend to choose mutual funds that coincide with where they think success will lie. That means choosing foreign or domestic, stocks or bonds, and even individual sectors like technology, retail, energy, etc.

The world of mutual funds is vast, and provide an opportunity to beat the market, but it comes with a price. I'll leave the rest up to you to do your research.

Finally comes individual stock picking. Picking individual stocks is the highest risk, but also have the potential for the highest returns. Also, there are no fees except for the fee for purchasing your shares.

There is also a lot to this world, as I'm sure you know, but if this route interests you, then I would suggest you pick up a few books, beginning with The Intelligent Investor.

This book is, in my opinion, the best introduction out there to investing for long term wealth.

Finally, since you're so young and you seem to have an eye out for your personal finances, I absolutely recommend you read The Millionaire Next Door.

Good luck!

u/strolls · 10 pointsr/UKPersonalFinance

It's statistically unlikely that active investors will beat the market - that's not actually the same thing as hard. Saying that it's very difficult to beat the market is just a useful shorthand.

In Tim Hale's Smarter Investing he tells the story of James [1,](https://i.imgur.com/0z08uhw.png) [2,](https://i.imgur.com/pIN2fyR.png) [3] to illustrate typical retail investor behaviour. Read it for yourself - is he wrong to say that most retail investors behave like this? James is perhaps a bit worse than average, but investing psychology is the curse of most retail investors and they things like panic selling in a downturn.

Other retail investors are underinformed know-it-alls, which is a curse one has to look out for - as an active investor you have to be incredibly humble, and you have to examine your own motivations and fears; your goal is to understand your own flaws and shortcomings as an investor, endeavouring not to fall prey to them.

One of the most common statistics cited against active investing is that the majority of fund managers do not beat the market [1, 2, 3]. I can't say I know all the reasons, but other investing psychologies apply to them - most of them are corporate employees and have bosses to answer to; investors will flee when they underperform and generally there are pressures upon them which will lead them to conform and hug the index (but with higher costs).

Search YouTube for the videos of Paul Lountzis speaking at Ivey - I think they're each about 60 or 90 minutes each, and he does repeat himself some, but they're worth watching in their entirety if you're interested in this stuff. If you're interested in this stuff you should be reading and watching as much as possible, because it is a necessity to be informed.

Lountzis gives the example of a new fund manager arriving at an investment bank, and being given $10M or $100M to invest on behalf of clients. He is given a sector he must invest in - like US small cap - and then he must invest that money within 30 days or so. He cannot sit on this money for 6 months looking for the right opportunities, because who would put their money in an investment fund that is sitting on 80% or 90% cash? Hence many of the best opportunities are denied them - they must invest the money and they may be forced to realise losses if they need to release money to investors or invest in something else. This constraint is not foisted upon the private investor.

If you ignore the costs of trading - which are incurred by index funds too - half of all stockmarket transactions beat the market. The problem is with doing it consistently, but I believe it's possible to beat the market with discipline, a buy-and-hold strategy and some fundamental analysis (read The Intelligent Investor).

u/ludwigvonmises · 9 pointsr/austrian_economics

Sure there are.

  • The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel

  • Austrian School for Investors by Rahim Taghizadegan

    Although Taleb is not strictly an Austrian economist, his book The Black Swan contains a lot of Austrian insights on probability, uncertainty, risk, public choice insights (regarding govt, the Fed, and financial markets in general). He quotes Hayek and other Austrians approvingly throughout.

    Also of interest would be Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Not an Austrian by any means, but his value-investment approach is consistent with Austrian theories on the firm and his comments about uncertainty and forecasting could have nearly been written by Mises himself.
u/TheRealAntacular · 9 pointsr/investing

Here's a short list of what I would consider the cream of the crop as far as fundamental analysis books for a beginner:

Beating the Street

One Up on Wall Street

F Wall Street

Financial Times Guide to Value Investing


Getting Started in Value Investing

And of course

The Intelligent Investor

u/ttg314 · 8 pointsr/investing

mayne, investopedia puts ya off on da right foot, ma suggestion...read all da articles. den u can start readin da good shit lyke ma nigga buffets book. also dis nigga khan will teach ya a lot of gud shit. member ta read da wsj, bloomberg, ft, dealbook, marketwatch, ect. to know wuts goin on in da wild markets.

gud luck ma nigz, if ya need more pointers just let a nigga know

u/Beren- · 8 pointsr/SecurityAnalysis
u/darthvoldemort7 · 7 pointsr/stocks

The old adage goes "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he's got food for life" or something along those lines.

Therefore, instead of answering your Reddit post, I will refer you to the Bible of Investing, "The Intelligent Investor".

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) (Collins Business Essentials) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060555661/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_ESjbzbJMA1ZR0

Don't be a sucker who plays the market. It's on a tear right now and everyone is overly optimistic. Place it in a vanguard etf or a robo advisor like betterment or wealthfront. Take the emotion out of your investing and enjoy the 4-7% growth over the next ten years.

u/jay9909 · 7 pointsr/investing

I read the following, in roughly this order:

u/Awesomeautism · 7 pointsr/stocks

This is what I tell all beginning investors, also being told this myself as a beginner, but before you find any sort of apps to trade on or taking stock recommendations, you need to figure out what kind of investor you are and develop an investing technique that fits you. What kinds of stock you invest in are mainly determined by how long you want to wait before selling the stock and how urgently you need the money.

Most investors are typically classified as either Defensive or Speculative. Defensive investors are ones who buy stocks in companies that have a long history of slow growth, and are not likely to make big gains quick. These kinds or stocks are the kinds people would invest in for their retirement or educational plans and are either classified as Defensive stocks (slow steady growth) or Income Stocks (stocks that pay out high dividends above the national inflation rate).Stocks like these would belong to companies that sell products that are classified as Essentials such as food, water, or energy.

Speculative investors invest in stocks that they believe are going to grow quick, and are willing to take on major risk in order to potentially see those large gains. These kinds of stocks are classified as Speculative (high growth and risk), Growth Stock (small or start up companies with high risk), or Cyclical (performance fluctuates with the economy in major losses or gains). These kinds of stocks would belong to companies that sell luxury products that may not sell well if demand is not high enough.

What you need to know is what kind of investor you are, and what kinds of returns you want, and how quickly you want them. Once you know that, you can find the right stocks for you. But now is the best time for people like you to be learning about investing, gaining experience, and investing in companies.

Once you know how quickly you want returns, and how much risk you want to take, you can begin to develop an investing technique that suits your comfort zone. This will ensure that you don't get ahead of yourself, and lose all your money in blind foolishness.
If you want an app to practice investing before you do the real thing, Investopedia.com has a great simulator that lets you invest fake money and get accurate feedback of the market. The website also has a wealth of information about every subject you could learn about in regards to the stock market and trading.

Yahoo Finance is one of the best websites I've found for easily accessing the data you need on each stock and getting the best feedback of the current state of the market. You can also easily find stocks with the Yahoo Stock Screener.

If you want a book recomendation, The Intelligent Investor is considered an essential read for anyone who wants to have success, large or small, within the trading market. Warren Buffet, the most successful stock trader in history, said that it is "By far the best book on investing ever written." Here's the amazon page to buy it.

u/azirafale · 6 pointsr/UniversityofReddit

I just stumbled onto this subreddit for the first time now, so apologies if I'm not replying to the request as desired.

Investing isn't really something that you can learn, in the sense that it's not like riding a bike where you practice and then after a little bit you know how to ride a bike and that's it. Think of learning to invest more as a constant journey, where you're always growing and gaining understanding but you can't really ever know enough. Most successful investors, including Warren Buffett and Charles Munger, are voracious readers simply because there is so much out there to absorb.

Here's the start of a reading list to take a look at, listed in order of how I would tackle them in your place (though obviously skip some or jump ahead if one description catches your eye specifically):


  • Millionaire Next Door--not an investing book, but you mentioned saving for the future and so I think this is a good place to start. This book, which covers the results of a study of many first generation millionaires, will teach you how you should be thinking about money, saving, and consumption. Dry, but not a difficult read.


    Indexing:

  • Random Walk Down Wall Street

  • Four Pillars of Investing

  • Unconventional Success--These three I would consider as one big package, because they all address kind of the same philosophy and investing strategy (though in slightly different ways). There's no preferred order for this group, so I've listed them in what I think is from most accessible to least accessible (they all get into some technical details that may be difficult for someone not familiar with the topics, but they are all written for the layman so while it may take some work, you should be able to get through all three).

  • Bogle on Mutual Funds--This is the only book I'm recommending here that I haven't actually read. I'm including it only because I realize that you asked for a crash course so to speak, and none of the three books above are 100% easily accessible (though they do cover everything). I've read other books by John Bogle and I know enough about him and his investment philosophy to be able to recommend this confidently enough and to have a good idea what he talks about here. I suggest trying as much of the above three as possible, but if you do find them too difficult try this one out first as it'll undoubtedly be an easier read all the while covering most of the basic points outlined in the above.


    Value Investing:

  • The Little Book That Beats the Market--Very short, very accessible (all technical details are hidden away in the appendix. I don't recommend following his strategy outlined in the book verbatim, but as an intro to value investing concepts it's not a bad start.

  • The Intelligent Investor--This is basically a summation of Warren Buffett's investing philosophy. It is quite old, and definitely difficult at times, but well worth reading.


    Those are what I would start with. I recommend reading the books on indexing first not because I think the efficient market hypothesis (one of the topics covered in all three books) is 100% correct (it isn't), but because you need to have a filter in place that makes you skeptical and able to dismiss all the garbage investing advice that's out there (technical strategies promising 10%+ yearly returns guaranteed, etc). The value investing books I include because it is the only chance you have of beating the market over the long run, though I would only recommend the active management route if you have the time and energy to dedicate to it.

    Most of what's in these books does boil down to a few basic tenets that could probably be summarized in a few pages, but I would discourage you from looking for quick investing summary information because it won't be of any use to you. It's not enough to understand/know the concepts. You have to believe in them, and live them every day. If you aren't absolutely convinced of the investing strategy you're using you'll wind up capitulating at the worst possible time and losing a lot of money, or at the very least being one of the many people who 'chase winners' only to suffer from consistently mediocre performance. That's why you need to be reading regularly--to keep your conviction and refresh yourself on the fundamentals.

    Best of luck.
u/albh · 6 pointsr/vancouver

Before you even go to a financial advisor or one that any Redditor might post to recommend as friends, go borrow these books from the library for a read so the investment world makes sense to you when you do talk about money with a planner and want to make sure you're getting good advice:

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661

http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/0393081435

http://www.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Way-Second/dp/0471743674

If you're really lazy, at least read the first one.
If you're really, really lazy. Follow this blog for a bit http://canadiancouchpotato.com/

After that, only then should you take referrals and recommendations. Go to a few, and armed with some knowledge, you'll be much prepared to sift through advisors that are trying to bullshit you for front-loaded commissions, etc.

u/classiste · 6 pointsr/gadgets

If their stock dropped 61% because apple pulled out - they don't have a bright future. You sound like the kind of person interested in investing in coal.

Edit: Educate yourself: https://www.amazon.com/Security-Analysis-Foreword-Buffett-Editions/dp/0071592539

The past is not an indication of the future in investing. You are speculating, one of the worst things you could do as an investor - here, educate yourself some more: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/indexinvestoreu · 6 pointsr/eupersonalfinance

I would recommend against buying individual stocks for any non-sophisticated investors. There is wide research that shows that most active investors can't consistently get good returns on individual stocks. The bogleheads wiki elaborates on this topic (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_philosophy)

If you do wish to invest in individual stocks I think you may need to devote time to do thorough research on your investments. I seriously don't think some stocks recommendations on reddit are going to be very useful. The learnings of the Intelligent Investor (https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661) are a good start.

​

u/dag_1996 · 6 pointsr/stocks

> "I've been doing my research and realise there is no way to make it rich quick ..."

It appears that you've already learned two of the most important things about investing: [1] Like anything else in life, what you will get out of it is a direct result of what you put into it (doing your research is extremely important to investing in individual stocks). [2] Investment returns are a direct result of the amount of risk taken, so you generally won't "get rick quick" unless you risk losing everything quick and there's still never any guarantee. That approach is not recommended, especially for beginners, but it's important to know that very many prefer that approach so you must take all advice and "hot tips" with a pound of salt.

As someone else suggested, it might be best to start with an ETF while you continue to learn how to evaluate individual companies, sectors, etc. ... perhaps an ETF that focuses on a strategy like DGI (dividend growth investing). Last, but certainly not least, read [The Intelligent Investor] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661) by Benjamin Graham.

u/G_Morgan · 5 pointsr/investing

Since you are from the UK I'm going to recommend /r/UKPersonalFinance's bible of Tim Hale's Smarter Investing. That basically explains passive investing, investing aims and timelines, portfolio strategies, etc and also inoculates you against trying to be too clever.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smarter-Investing-3rd-edn-Decisions/dp/0273785370

You can also read the more general The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham but unless you are going to really dedicate a shed load of time to it Tim Hale's book is precisely what you need. Graham is basically the standard text on the matter but it goes into a lot of detail that isn't really relevant anymore whereas Smarter Investing is primed for modern investing and particularly deals with the UK environment more.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661

If you are going to invest you absolutely want to use the right platform for it. The UK has a good number of tax efficient platforms for investment. Specifically:

  1. Stocks and Shares ISA - Standard tax free investment account. You can put in £20k annually and will never pay capital gains taxes on the earnings. The new tax year starts on the 5th of April so if you have money to invest now you can put money in without using the limit for 2018-2019.

  2. Lifetime ISA - Similar to a S&S ISA except there is a £4k limit (this counts to your £20k limit but you can only put £4k in a LISA). The big win with a LISA is the government puts in 25% of whatever you put in. The downside is you cannot withdraw money penalty free unless buying your first house or when you are 55. Withdrawing otherwise means you pay a 25% penalty on withdrawal (and because -25% is bigger than +25% you actually lose money). Again a LISA opened now can take £4k before the tax year ends on the 5th. Then you could put in another £4k from the 6th. One other detail is you cannot use a LISA towards a house within 12 months of opening it.

  3. SIPP - A tax free investment pension. You never pay CGT like an ISA and you can put in however much you want. The government will give you back your income tax on up to £40k (that is the amount put in + the returned income tax caps at £40k) though you'll have to self assess to reclaim tax on higher rates (basically the government will put up your tax free limit for next year, the bonus is only directly 25%). You cannot withdraw until you are 55, penalties on early withdrawal are absurd (60%+). At 55 you can immediately take out 25% tax free. Any further withdrawals are taxable income.

    Basically it boils down to SIPP for retirement, LISA for buying a house (and to diversify against potential changes to the SIPP in law), S&S ISA for everything else. The one upside of an ISA over a SIPP is withdrawals from ISAs are never taxable. So using the £4k LISA limit each year makes sense once you are below the upper bands on income tax. As you'll effectively be able to withdraw from your LISA at will from 55.

    //edit - List of platform providers and fees below.

    http://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/
u/jacobheiss · 5 pointsr/investing

A lot of this comes down to how actively you want to engage in the process, how much of an "enterprising investor" you want to be as opposed to a defensive investor.

For the more defensive position, a lot of /r/investing appreciates Graham's approach emphasizing value, even if a substantial quantity of capital is devoted to playing the market itself (something Graham called speculating). If that approach is interesting to you--which seems likely given your stated desire for low to medium risk with steady growth--then the main adjustments you'd need to make are as follows:

  • Quit sinking the majority of your capital investment into just a couple stocks and stay away from actively managed mutual funds, too. For upwards of 80% to 90% of your capital, go with a balance of indexed stocks and bonds. A common way to do that is to subtract your age from 100 and let the difference be the percentage of stocks; in your case, we're talking 76% of your capital in indexed stocks and 24% in bonds if you did not set aside anything for more speculative forms of investment. If you set aside, say, 10% of your capital for speculation, then we'd be talking about roughly 68% of your total capital in indexed stock and 22% of your total capital in bonds. Periodically buy / sell to maintain this balance; some people who are really disinterested in closely playing the market do this only once or twice per year with long term success. Your goal here is to diversify your capital outlay in one of the most boring yet demonstrably low risk / consistent growth ways out there, and that is a portfolio heavily biased towards indexed stock and bonds. For a text that develops the logic and details of this approach, read The Millionaire Teacher.

  • There are tax advantages to contributing to a 401k; so, a lot of people would council maxing this out. Nevertheless, a 401k is just a type of account; you would still want to follow the principle in the previous point in deciding specifically what sort of investment you want to "point" your 401k towards. (I say this because some people are under the mistaken impression that a 401k is itself a form of investment, e.g. "I have some capital in stocks, some in bonds, and some in a 401k.")

  • With whatever quantity of capital you chose to devote to more speculative activity, say, 10% of your total capital outlay, think of this as your chance to experiment. If you like KO and WEN, great. As frequently as you want to play the markets, whether you want to go long on this stock or short on that, this (and only this) portion of your capital is yours to do with as you please. Have fun, but don't ever allow yourself to pull capital from your more secured forms of investment over to speculative activity if your goal is "low to medium risk with steady growth." Speculation is inherently risky; that's the way it works. And it's not something you can just do every once in a while with consistently solid results; it takes serious devotion.

  • Since you mentioned holiding a normal savings account and/or a CD, I'm going to mention that most folks council retaining upwards of 3 to 6 months worth of expenses in a totally liquid form of savings. This won't make you any money whatsoever (well, unless we wind up with a nice drop in inflation and you can take advantage of some pretty crazy rates select credit unions offer, like Baxter's "Rainy Day Savings" at 3.0% APY). But that's okay; the goal here is to have cash on hand for an emergency. CD rates are pretty terrible across the board right now; so, you're better off going with a high interest online savings account like ING Direct Savings or Discover Online Savings if you don't want to bother with or cannot get credit union membership enabling you to snag those nicer savings account rates.
u/bbqbot · 5 pointsr/investing

Go read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor for everything you need to know about value investing. Buffet claims he won't ever write a book since everything is in there (also, author is the guy who Warren learned from).

Excellent book.

u/beavioso · 5 pointsr/AskReddit

Warren Buffett, richest guy in the world at one point, now probably in second or third believes in smart investing. He went to Columbia University in NYC to learn directly from Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. So, you couldn't go wrong by reading or skimming The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham before you seek a financial investor. See if your local library has a newer edition (it will include a discussion on newer securities, such as Mutual Funds, etc.).

u/pokemong · 5 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Have a look at this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intelligent-Investor-Benjamin-Graham/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300704487&sr=8-1. It is written by the guy who taught Warren Buffet to invest and mostly covers the general approach and mechanics of investing in fundamentals. It's the bible of personal investing. I would check out the links other redditors provided for the very basics, then read this book to understand the overarching concepts. Good luck!

u/publius_lxxii · 5 pointsr/IAmA

>>Read the intelligent investor After you finish it, ...

>Warren Buffet loves that book.

That's a minor understatement.

Warren Buffett named his son, Howard Graham Buffett, after the author. No joke.





u/zpenacho · 5 pointsr/personalfinance

Calculate out/project your monthly expenses and multiply them by 3-6. Then start saving that amount of money in a savings account. If for some reason you lose your job or something happens (your car breaks down, you have a medical bill) you can use this money to keep yourself from going into debt. When the emergency has passed, replenish the savings account.

Once that's established setup a Roth IRA and start contributing to it and investing.

If you're serious about trading, read these two books in this order before proceeding:


https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp/0470102101

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/q_pop · 5 pointsr/UKInvesting

Over at /r/ukpersonalfinance we have a small "recommended reading" list that's worth looking at.=: http://www.reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance/wiki/faq#wiki_recommended_reading

> Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
>
> This book was written by the father of "value investing", and the mentor of Warren Buffett, who is widely accepted to be the world's most successful investor.
>
> It was originally published in 1948, but Ben Graham updated it periodically over the years, and it stands as true today as it ever has.
>
> Beating the Street - Peter Lynch
>
> Published in 1994, this is arguably showing its age more than Intelligent Investor. Either way, valuable reading from one of the best managers of money in the past few decades.
>
> Naked Trader - Robbie Burns
>
> Subtitled "How anyone can make money trading shares", this is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek account of one financial journalist's attempt to quit his job and make £1,000,000 using a short-to-medium term trading strategy. Not very scientific, but an interesting counterpoint to the previous recommendations.
>
> Smarter Investing - Tim Hale
>
> The ultimate counterpoint to attempting to "beat the markets" - after spending 15 years working in active fund manager, Tim Hale concluded that the best outcomes for most investors in most situations would be a simple portfolio of "passive" investments (that is, funds which attempt to track a market, rather than outperform it). This style is favoured by the likes of Monevator, and many of the subscribers here.
>
> Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder letters - Warren Buffett
>
> Not a book, but a series of essays over the years from the world's most successful investor. Makes interesting reading! Notably, the 2014 letter (not published in the above link but published here in abridged form) implies that he now feels most investors would be best served by low-cost trackers.
>
> The Financial Times guide to investing - Glen Arnold
>
> A great starter guide, going from the very basics (why businesses need shareholders) to more in-depth explanations of different types of investment, and step-by-step guides on how to execute trades.
>

u/Panasonicy0uth · 4 pointsr/personalfinance

As someone who works in finance for a living, I promise it's not as complicated as it seems. Once you understand the fact that the finance industry intentionally complicates and obfuscates its inner-workings to generate demand for our services and add a little bit more profit here and there, everything will seem a lot less intimidating.

If you're the bookish type and are serious about learning about the markets, I'd recommend checking out The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. I really like this edition because it has summaries after every chapter that ties the concepts presented by Graham to more recent economic developments such as the Dot Com Bubble and The Great Recession, among other things, and attempts to apply them. It's a dense read, even if you have a background in economics or finance like I do, but it's well worth it.

u/kitcar · 4 pointsr/TorontoRealEstate

Remember, buying something that is cashflow negative with no guaranteed appreciation is not an investment in the classical sense - it's speculation. See https://www.amazon.ca/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Value-Investing/dp/0060555661.

u/Nostrabrahmus · 4 pointsr/investing

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely understand you are young and need guidance. I was 17 when I started investing as well.

I can give stock recommendations all day but I can give you two really good pieces of advice right now.

1: Read. Read everything you can. The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham is the bible of value investing. Warren Buffet himself said that this was the best book on value investing he's read. Read this book. Also, read Rich Dad Poor Dad This was the single most influential piece of literature I've ever read.

2: Be extremely careful who you take advice from. Just because people are older doesn't make them smarter. You want to find people who have exactly what you want for yourself. These people are worth taking advice from. The average person is an idiot, and they all think they know the right way, and yet they all are slaving away at jobs they hate that "don't pay them enough". This could even be your parents or friends. It may be hard to reject their advice. They may not even realize that they don't know what they are doing. Again, you want to learn from people who have exactly what you want.

u/Redebidet · 4 pointsr/investing

If you are looking for forecasts, you will probably read a bunch of investing news sites. They all have forecasts for pretty much everything under the sun, and you will pretty much filter out anything that doesn't say what you want to hear. Don't put much stock into forecasts.

Do yourself a favor and read The Intelligent Investor. It sounds like you're looking to make some quick bucks on some money you don't really need, but that could lead to speculation, not investing, and you could wind up losing a lot more than you think possible.

The book will give you a good idea of how to split your capital between stocks and bonds, and why splitting is a good idea. It will tell you how to evaluate stocks and industries, so when you read about forecasts and what have you, you can actual evaluate what you're being told. It's a good place to start.

If you look to the side bar to the right, there is additional information on how to start out.

u/jagershotzz · 4 pointsr/StockMarket

The grandaddy of them all is "The Intelligent Investor" Benjamin Graham. "By far the best book on investing ever written." --Warren Bufett

u/TOMtheCONSIGLIERE · 4 pointsr/investing

> Or is there something that I am missing.

Yes.

-

So if they have more profits next year, and do the same thing, it happens again and again and again and again. The value goes back up, then it gets distributed out to the SHs. So you have your stock (similar price) PLUS income.

-

I suggest you read this and this.

u/pangolin44 · 4 pointsr/investing

Here's the recommended reading list on this subreddit's sidebar.

I personally started off with Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street. It's a good book for beginners to help you start thinking about stocks analytically. Regardless of what you start off with though, definitely follow it up with The Intelligent Investor. That is a fundamental book with some big concepts in there such as "Mr. Market" and "Margin of Safety"... but it's not an easy read until you have some foundation first.

u/DirectorCurator · 4 pointsr/financialindependence

How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go? Buffett himself would recommend you index. But, if you must, start with Ben Graham and move on to learning accounting and then start with Buffett's annual letters.

u/HonorAmongSteves · 4 pointsr/personalfinance

Investing is a marathon, not a sprint. I'd recommend you read The Intelligent Investor before making any purchases.

u/GrahamAndDoddsville · 4 pointsr/investing

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060555661/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_3Unbub0KY51BG

u/Vicariousjake · 3 pointsr/csgomarketforum

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) (Collins Business Essentials)

Link: http://amzn.com/0060555661
Though it is for the real life investing, most theories still apply.

To answer your questions:

  1. Don't bother buying Fnatic ,NV,C9, VP, or probably LG this major, there will be a huge amount of these for sale as they are the peoples favorites and will take FOREVER to get to a worthy profit, assuming all stickers will be 75% off after the final. Small teams that will most likely never return to the major are a no go as well, like spylce, gambit, etc. So choose the teams in the middle, their sticker prices will usually increase 100% within about 6 months and that's about as fast a turnaround you can hope for.

  2. Like others have said stickers will most likely never go to the price they were in 2014 due to the size of the audience and the abundant knowledge that there is a possibility the stickers could be the next 2014 Kato Titan Holo. So will it take time ,yes.

    You could go for the gamble and try to buy stickers of teams who you may think will have a roster change like C9 or VP after the major. As we have seen in the past with G2,Titan,Fnatic a roster change directly affects the price of stickers.
u/Rootlx · 3 pointsr/portugal

Não tens de agradecer, my pleasure. Assim de repente, alguns clássicos e outros livros que possam ser úteis:

- Rich Dad Poor Dad

- One Up on Wall Street

- The Intelligent Investor

- Everyday Millionaires

- Your Money, Your Life

- Side Hustle

- Motley Fool for Teens - não leves a mal ter escolhido a edição "for teens" - é só porque é um excelente guia para quem está a começar e vai investir quantias pequenas só para molhar o pé. Se quiseres algo mais completo, tudo o que é do Motley Fool (incluindo o site, newsletters e podcast) é bom.

Em português não conheço muito e o único que me vem à cabeça é este do Pedro Queiroga Carrilho.

u/jeffrey4044 · 3 pointsr/phinvest

I'm one of those Robinhood users but I can't complain about much it's not a bad way to start learning how to trade and buy stocks. I contribute every payday into my account it's currently around $5,000. Not much but it's decent. For the last two-and-a-half years I've been investing a portion of my paychecks to the stock market I spent about four months losing a lot of money trying to follow all these YouTube gurus advice. I lost about $1,500 trying to do that. Eventually though I decided I should just teach myself the ropes instead of taking somebody else's word for it. I purchased 4 books from Amazon and these books are great they teach you a lot of stuff about the stock market how to value companies and ideas to help you grow your portfolio over time I just wanted to recommend these books if somebody is just starting out it's not that much money it's about $45 worth of investment it has been great for me since reading them. I also have to recommend a YouTuber that I follow quite closely his name is Jeremy and his channel is called financial education. I like his investment style and I try to do very similar things myself.

.https://amzn.to/2mnwnOg The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

https://amzn.to/2nVmy A Random Walk Down Wall Street by  Burton G. Malkiel

https://amzn.to/2nfkfiE Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller

https://amzn.to/2nn7imH The Bogleheads’ Guide to the 3 Fund Portfolio by Taylor Larimore

u/novacham · 3 pointsr/politics

If you're young and the market tanks, you should be investing more. Best time to buy stocks is when the market is down.

If you're nearing retirement age, you should shift to something less volatile and safer, like cash / bonds.

I suggest reading "The Intelligent Investor" for start. It's written by the man Warren Buffet absolutely idolizes.

u/arkanus · 3 pointsr/FinancialPlanning

>Second of all, I appreciate that the DOL and IRS have made it easy for "shortsighted people" to save, but I don't appreciate the assumption you make about me not ever being able to save so much.

It was a deduction based on the facts presented.

>I don't have significant debt (less than $1,000 owed in total), and I don't have or use credit cards.

If you don't have CC debt then what is the $1,000? If it is mortgage, student loans or even a car loan then that is one thing, otherwise it probably is a bad sign.

>I just paid for a 12 day cruise with money I saved up over a couple of months. So, despite your assumptions, I assure you that I have the ability to save and am fiscally mature.

How much money do you have total? You just said that you have $1,000 in debt. You also have only listed $10,000 in retirement assets. I am glad that you could save up to go on a cruise, that puts you ahead of many people, but I still would wonder if you are saving enough for the future.

>Then the whole stock market mashup with guy who typed a b instead of an m made everything go tits up. I went from $7,900 ish to $7,000 ish.

Are you talking about the flash crash? You (almost certainly) did not lose 10% of your fund during the flash crash. When it happened the market recovered most of the loss before the end of the day. Since it is nearly impossible to do an interday trade in a 401(k), it is highly unlikely that you actually sold during the crash. In fact since 401(k) balances are typically updated at the end of the day you would not have even seen what the value of your account was at the low period.

If what you are talking about is the flash crash, then you are blowing a lot of smoke up my ass because it just didn't go down the way that you describe for a 401(k) participant.

>I realize that financial advisers tell us (me) that "it's not really money until you cash it out", except that's not entirely true. If I see a deduction from my paycheck for $110 per pay period, that's real fucking money.

They are generally right. The issue is that your time horizon is far too short for this money. You should not care what your 401(k) does in a month, in a year or even a few years. You should be investing with a time horizon of decades so these short term fluctuations will (probably) wash out in time. If your time horizon is really this short or you really are so risk averse then there are more suitable investments under your plan that you could move your money to.

>That's money I could have had in MY savings account NOT being arbitrarily messed with because some financial institution can't account for mistakes/fluctuations, etc.

Then you can always trade to an investment option which better suits your risk profile. Call your plan and find out what is available. They might think that your foolish for putting everything into a conservative investment at 29, but ultimately it is your choice.

>I find that I a) don't love seeing money I've earned through my hard work being put in an account and then disappear. I'd rather invest it myself.

It sounds like you would rather spend this money than invest it. In any case if you are so financially unsophisticated that you have to come onto Reddit to ask what would happen if you took a distribution from your 401(k) what makes you think that you will do any better investing your money than your current 401(k) plan? From your above attempt to (inaccurately) describe how the flash crash impacted you I get the feeling that you think you know a lot more than you actually do.

>I just wonder if I can find a better alternative than stocks that I don't understand in a mutual fund I share with people in my company.

What are you going to do, invest it in gold? What in the world makes you think that you know the first thing about investing. Do you realize that most of the people running those mutual funds have PhDs from ivy league universities and decades of experience? While there is some serious academic doubt that even with all of their knowledge that they can beat the market, what makes you think that you have the first clue about how to proceed?

I know that I may seem to be coming off as somewhat brash with my post. The reason for that is I really don't like seeing people throw their money away. I see a lot of terrible advice on Reddit by people that don't have any idea about how stocks actually work, but they are damn sure that it is all a scam and the only place to invest is (gold, property, tech stocks or whatever the scheme of the moment is).

There is a really good forum for educating yourself about investments here. You might also want to consider picking up some investment literature so that you can learn about the topic. If you really hate your 401(k) you could look at contributing, with future money, to a Roth IRA instead, which gives you more control.

Ultimately though it is your money and the decision is yours. No one on Reddit can give you personal financial advice because we don't know your full situation. Whatever path you take, I wish you luck and hope that it ends well for you.

u/wipny · 3 pointsr/investing

I just started reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

So far, I've found it relatable and informative. The book can get a little technical, but it offers solid, practical advice that anyone can learn from.

One of the lessons that stood out to me was the difference between investing and speculating.

Investing is making informed, long term decisions based on objectivity and sound financial principles with an emphasis on risk aversion.

Speculating is making short term decisions based on groupthink and emotion, with a focus on taking advantage of short term price fluctuations.

If you do decide to speculate, make sure you treat it as such and do not ever confuse it with investing.

He goes on to list the ways speculating can be unintelligent.

  1. Speculating when you think you are investing;
  2. Speculating seriously instead of as a pastime, when you lack proper knowledge and skill for it; and
  3. Risking more money in speculation than you can afford to lose (no more than 10% of your "investment" reserve).
u/cylon56 · 3 pointsr/investing

I see that Intelligent Investor by Graham has already been posted but that's certainly a good one. However it can be a bit dry for most readers and if you would prefer something a bit fresher I would read Deep Value by Toby Carlisle. He discusses and critiques Graham's teachings along with the strategies of other notable value investors such as Buffet, Icahn, Greenblatt and many others all in a more modern tone. It's been the bible for my own value investing strategies.

Other books to look into are:

  • Dhandho Investor by Monish Pabrai (lots of simple strategies and examples for small risk - big payoff investments)
  • Education of a Value Investor by Guy Spier (good for understanding the discipline and mental state of a good value investor)
  • Michael Lewis books such as Big Short and Flash Boys (These are less for learning investing and more for generating your own interest in finance with some fantastic writing. It's also good for learning what the reality of the markets and Wall Street are.)
u/HowDid_This_GetHere · 3 pointsr/stocks

This book while perhaps a bit dry has all of the information that you are looking for.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661

This book, is a solid guide to building a stable portfolio. However, it doesn't get into the nitty gritty of individual stock evaluation.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Investors-Manifesto-Prosperity-Armageddon/dp/0470505141/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334165783&sr=1-1

u/drivefaster · 3 pointsr/business

A random walk, the intelligent investor, and black swan are all good ones.

Are you looking for trading, internal business, etc? more detailed would be helpful.

u/justjacobmusic · 3 pointsr/investing

If you don't want to make a career out of trading, a helpful rule of thumb is a 90 / 10 principle popularized by Andrew Hallam in his text Millionaire Teacher: Stick 90% of your capital in tax sheltered, virtually passive forms of investment like index mutual funds or ETFs with an IRA wrapper and stick the other 10% in whatever investment vehicle you want to learn.

For example, I put 90% of my capital in a batch of index funds and ETFs predicated on John Bogle's suggestion of "your age in bonds, the rest in common stock" index funds and ETFs by way of an account with Vanguard for my IRA and my company's 403(b) program. Vanguard makes this really easy through their target retirement funds, which automatically adjust the ratio of stock / bonds over time. I'm really interested in value investing; so, I take long positions in individual stock that meets the criteria Benjamin Graham identified in Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor with the other 10% of my capital via a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade--this isn't tax sheltered like my retirement accounts but it's basically an ongoing education in investing since TD Ameritrade offers a ton of instructional materials on topics like options, commodities, etc. and I want to see my money grow.

Let's take a look at what this could look like for your situation. Starting with $5k and doing something like what I'm doing, you would:

  1. Open an account with Vanguard or whomever else you want to deal with for your IRA and invest $4500 there. If you follow that same rule of thumb I mentioned from Bogle, you could stick 18% of that in a bond ETF like BND, i.e. $810. Of course, you'll have to purchase in units equivalent to the going rate of the ETF shares, which $83.22 at present. So, you'd have to go with 10 shares for a total of $832.20 invested. Then, you could stick the rest in a total stock market ETF like VTI, whose going rate is $103.50 at present. To invest 82% of your available $4500, or $3690, you would need to buy 35 shares for a total of $3685.50 invested. But maybe all this seems way too complex to keep track of year after year; so, you could instead just invest all $4500 in a one-stop-shop composite index fund like Vanguard's Target Retirement 2035, which currently features a ratio pretty close to what you want between bonds and stock and will automatically adjust for you over time.

  2. Open an account with pretty much any other decent brokerage, study up, and invest your remaining cash in whatever you want to learn how to do. $500 is not going to buy you much stock, but you could pull off a few options plays with that amount of cash. The key here is to provide a context where you basically force yourself to learn how to invest by having an actual stake in the game. A lot of people advocate paper trading, i.e. executing trades with fake money but real stock market numbers, as a way to learn how to invest; however, we all behave differently when our actual money is at stake. It's better to learn with actual money, even if it's not much. As I mentioned before, I personally like TD Ameritrade because they provide a lot of instructional content; however, your mileage may vary.

    Any follow up questions?
u/pborowiecki · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Read this book: The Intelligent Investor

If you're looking for a way to make quick money and become millionaire quick then that book isn't for you.

u/TheMightyLizard · 3 pointsr/UKPersonalFinance

Ok, that's basically what I did when I started out. Let me just say, there is a learning curve- and LOTS to learn. However, if investing turns out to be something you enjoy, and you always continue learning, you open the door to higher returns in general (and a very interesting hobby :D ).

At the start, you don't need to know much more than the general facts. Equity, bonds, the market. What the lingo means, and where the resources are. The original book I got for an overview was the following, and I would recommend it: The
The FT Investing Guide - not a cheap book, but will go over the foundational knowledge you need.

I would then follow with The Intelligent Investor, which is THE great value-investment book. It will tell you about how to logically approach investing in companies, and give you a framework for choosing better companies to invest in, and not overpaying for the equity you invest in.

Knowledge of macro economics is also a plus, imo. I started off by reading Economics for Dummies (yes, really).

The basics of accounting is somewhat essential, but it's covered in the FT guide. If you can get to the point where you can understand a typical income statement, balance sheet or statement of cash flows, it should be enough to be a competent investor. It allows you to understand the underlying financial health of a business, which is very important.

Your aim is to find strong companies, with good future prospects, which are undervalued by the market, and invest for the long-term. This will allow you to maximise your returns.

..I was all set to continue writing this wall of text, but I think I'll leave it here for now. If you have any further questions, or would like more clarification on any points, I'd be happy to help. So just let me know.

u/rodbarc123 · 3 pointsr/CanadianInvestor

Start with Millionaire Teacher. Then read The Single Best Investment. Then to understand the business behind the stock, read The Intelligent Investor. This will provide a good start on what to look for individual business. The more you think business like, the better investor you become.

u/All_Business · 3 pointsr/stocks

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332351037&sr=8-1

Great book to start with. Also, check out r/investing; it's more active than this subreddit, and there's a nice list of recommend readings, online resources, FAQs, etc on the sidebar.

u/moveovernow · 3 pointsr/personalfinance

Read these books, in this order:

Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
https://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowenstein/dp/0812979273/

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Still-Beats-Market/dp/0470624159/

Margin of Safety (only available in free PDF now, out of print)
https://files.leopolds.com/books/Margin.of.Safety.1st.Edition.1991.Klarman.pdf

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
https://www.amazon.com/Common-Stocks-Uncommon-Profits-Writings/dp/0471445509/

The Intelligent Investor
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

They'll teach you what's called value investing. As a system it was approximately originated by Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett's mentor. It's the only system of investing that has been shown to consistently work over an extremely long period of time (nearly a century at this point) and anybody can learn to utilize it.

The first book will give you a close-up walk-through of value investing by following Buffett from his earliest days forward, including how he thought about investing (the most important aspect). That'll prime you to more easily be able to understand and digest the next value investing books. Once you have digested enough about value investing, you'll be able to adapt its ways to the things you're particularly good at (there are various styles or approaches to value investing; the best at it all use slightly different custom techniques in how they find stocks, what kind of levels of value they require before they invest, when they prefer to sell or not, risk tolerance, etc). As a system it's fundamentally built around logic / reason as the primary tools of appraising investments and making decisions, it encourages you to push emotion out of the equation of investing as much as possible (and in doing so, you automatically acquire a dramatic leg up over most investors big and small).

Of critical importance: value investing is not about producing small conservative returns. The best value investors have smashed the market's average returns over extremely long periods of time and they have tended to beat all other types of investors. Value investing is about: 1) not destroying capital, so that you can retain and compound it, taking maximum advantage of the extreme power of compounding returns; 2) picking investments that have an appropriate margin of safety (they've been significantly mispriced by the market), that protects your downside, while exposing you to a very large potential upside.

u/blaine19 · 3 pointsr/badeconomics

I expected to find Jason Zweig on that episode. That guy is pretty much the poster child of sensible, simple investment advice. His WSJ column is pretty much dedicated to criticizing stuff like high-fee funds and stock speculation. It's named after the bestselling book on investing that Warren Buffet hails as his bible, which has been annotated by... Jason Zweig.

That segment was a great piece, it felt like a chapter out of the aforementioned The Intelligent Investor. Warren Buffet would approve of the investment advice and the rant against companies like John Hancock.

u/Atomm · 3 pointsr/personalfinance

Congratulations! You've doing great. I only wish I was as smart as you when I was your age. Heck, you're even ahead of me in some regards and I'm 10 years old than you.

I have not read it yet, but I've seen The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing recommended by others on Reddit as a way to understand investing for us average folks. You might look into it.

u/arnexa · 3 pointsr/FinancialPlanning

Ask a 1000 people and you will get more than 1000 answers - this is how varied and complex investing is. If you are a beginner, I would suggest learning about investing first. There are ample materials out there. Concepts you should learn about: asset classes (stocks, options, bonds), diversification (not putting all your eggs in one asset class or stock). Learn too about "valuation" - how much should an asset be valued at. This is a crucial concept that you should understand even if you buy etf/mutual funds. You can, for example, buy the right asset at the wrong valuation and be hurt. Valuation tries to answer the question "Is this asset (class) fairly valued?" Implicit in understanding valuation is "know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em".

I have personally benefited from Warren Buffett's writings and recommendations - so I read his shareholder letters (http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html). And I started with the "Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham (https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661).

Good luck.

u/vfxdev · 3 pointsr/politics

If you only ever get 1 book, you can read this in a couple days, and it helps you get started with Vanguard.

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Investing-Lessons-Every-Investor/dp/1118484878

Once you have a decent amount of money invested, this book will ensure you don't fuck it all up. A much longer read but full of good information on how to take the emotions out of investing, which are basically going to be your biggest foe.

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/Djcornstalks · 3 pointsr/StockMarket

The Intelligent Investor is a great beginner's book that Warren Buffet swears by

u/InfectedUvula · 3 pointsr/investing_discussion

There are a multitude of books that have been written and if you ask 100 people, you will get a 100 different answers on the best books to read. My recommendation is ignore all the flashy titles and strategy specific books that promise how to be a billionaire in 5 years or how to retire at age 25. Instead, for anyone just starting out, i recommend going with a solid foundation and once that is achieved, then find your individual specific plan. My three (actually four) books to get started in a serious entry into the investment markets are as follows (in order and assuming a starting point of Extreme Beginner)

  1. Get a "For Dummies Book" on Personal investment and on introduction to Stocks. Many people will drop a big steaming turd on the "For Dummies Book" series for being too basic or simplistic but i have found they are very helpful in introducing the the basic vocabulary and concepts behind many investing activities. Don't try to build a lifelong plan from these books but use them as a primer on terms and ideas.

    https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Finance-Dummies-Eric-Tyson/dp/1119114292/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1518157495&sr=8-2&keywords=personal+investing+for+dummies

    And

    https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Dummies-Business-Personal-Finance/dp/1119239281/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1518157731&sr=8-4&keywords=personal+investing+for+dummies

    2)The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing by Benjamin Graham.

    https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1518157481&sr=8-3&keywords=personal+investing

    This one is much more technical than the first read but I consider it "The Bible" for forming a solid education in value stock investing. Written just after World War 2, this book has been invaluable in understanding how to evaluate good investments in the stock market. I still don't know how investors did it before the internet, but using the principles presented in this book and the resources available online, your stock performance should be far in excess of anything you might do having not read it. Interesting side story: When i was in business school circa 1998-2001, I had a professor of Financial Analysis who introduced me to this book and also called it the Bible. In his lectures he and the students had many heated debates regarding the validity of Grahams teachings and how the investing world had outgrown Grahams views due to the rapidly growing diversity of investments today and the impact technology had on investing strategy. We, the students, were all blinded by the internet boom and all the stories of people who had an IPO for their company and became overnight billionaires, provided the company ended in dot-com. The professor was adamant that every generation was doomed to learn some hard and expensive lessons by thinking the Old masters no longer applied to the "New Reality". As an exercise we spent the following months reviewing many of the skyrocketing stocks that were part of the Dot Com bubble. The professor claimed that, based on his application of Graham's principles the only Dot com stocks he would consider holding for a minimum of 10 years from 1997 were Amazon, Intel, Sony, SAP and Microsoft. By 2000 he had fared much better than many of the students who thought the were going to be Pets.com billionaires.
    Which brings us to the third book:

  2. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay

    https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madness-Crowds/dp/1463740514/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518158993&sr=1-1&keywords=Extraordinary+Popular+Delusions+and+The+Madness+of+Crowds+by+Charles+MacKay

    If you though Grahams book was old this one is coming up on its 200th anniversary.
    This one is really not about investing as much as it is about the understanding how social psychology leads to things like, bubbles, panic crashes and fads that leave ruined investors in their wake. Every time I hear the word Bitcoin, I think of this book, just as I did back when everyone of my friends was going to be the next multimillionaire house flipper or day trader ten years ago. I am not saying that these strategies are inherently bad, just that it is important to be able to distinguish the facts from the hype, even when the person hyping it is yourself because you got swept up in the public craze. Read about the Dutch tulip craze and realize that the same forces are in play every day.

    Once you grind through these three, you will be more than ready to start on your individual path and well armed to make reasonable decisions. Good Luck!
u/LineBreakBot · 3 pointsr/personalfinance

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----

> I just have a few pointers. Not going to go into verbose explanation.
>
> - IRA will relieve $5500
> - 401K will relieve up to 17.5K
> - Starting your own LLC is tax relief
> - Buying a house (Wouldn't recommend this until you purchase in a buyer's market, but that's your choice).
> - Invest in stocks (Here's a good book on investing):
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483895406&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor
>
> Just a small thing, but figure out interest rates on savings and checking. If savings for your bank is greater than checking, put the bulk of your money there (If you're not comfortable stepping into investing it yet). Two reasons you want to do this: 1. Better interest is a few more cents returned than in checking. 2. If someone steals your debit card, at least all your money isn't in one place.
>

----

^(I am a bot. Contact) ^pentium4borg ^(with any feedback.)

u/0verlayFaBric · 3 pointsr/personalfinance

I just have a few pointers. Not going to go into verbose explanation.
-IRA will relieve $5500
-401K will relieve up to 17.5K
-Starting your own LLC is tax relief
-Buying a house (Wouldn't recommend this until you purchase in a buyer's market, but that's your choice).
-Invest in stocks (Here's a good book on investing):
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483895406&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor Just a small thing, but figure out interest rates on savings and checking. If savings for your bank is greater than checking, put the bulk of your money there (If you're not comfortable stepping into investing it yet). Two reasons you want to do this: 1. Better interest is a few more cents returned than in checking. 2. If someone steals your debit card, at least all your money isn't in one place. Last thing, regardless of your field (Because I'm guessing you're not going to be a stripper forever. It's just to pay the bills), get an accountant and figure out how to itemize things. Take their advice. They know how to get you extra money back at the end of the year. If you do things for the company i.e. drive a distance from work, and they don't reimburse you, KEEP RECEIPTS of getting gas. This can be itemized.

u/Dart000 · 2 pointsr/internetparents

I would recommend the Motley Fool for Investing and Retirement.

Warren Buffett and John Bogle

another good book The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

u/lolexecs · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Book recommendation:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661

Graham is the grandfather of value investing and influenced individuals like Warren Buffet.

u/tsuru · 2 pointsr/IAmA

The Intellegent Investor

My take away: Basically, if you don't have the time / energy to be researching in the companies behind the securities you want to invest in, go with index funds.

For the OP: Did you ever research? Did you even have time?

u/Lokgar · 2 pointsr/Military

If you're looking to start investing, I'd recommend The intelligent Investor to help learn how to save.

u/nows · 2 pointsr/investing

The quotes from the book:

> Someone who is desperate to buy a stock can easily end up having to bid 10 cents higher than the most recent share price before any sellers will be willing to part with it. That extra cost, called "market impact," never shows up on your brokerage statement, but it's real (p. 148).

What he is talking about is pricing impact. This is a real expense. Imagine you want to buy 100,000 shares of a stock that only trades 10,000 shares a day! If you need to get done today, you will have significant pricing impact. Large market cap tend to have more liquidity and therefore less pricing impact.

> Buying and selling a hot little stock can cost 2% to 4% (or 4% to 8% for a "round-trip" buy-and-sell transaction). If you put $1000 into a stock, your trading cots could eat up roughly $40 before you even get started. Sell the stock, and you could for over another 4% in trading expenses.
>
> ... Add it all up, and a stock trader needs to gain at last 10% just to break even on buying and selling a stock (p.149).

The author describes the costs including in actively trading. These costs include pricing impact, bid-ask spread, commissions, implementation shortfall, short-term capital gains tax, etc.

One significant goal of the SEC and FINRA over the last decade or so was to make changes to market structure to minimize transaction costs. Nowadays, move retail orders (which tend to be small, e.g. < 2000 shares), have very little pricing impact. In addition, the bid/ask spread has declined significantly since decimalization.

> Recently, finance professors Owen Lamont of University of Chicago and Paul Schultz of the University of Notre Dame have shown that corporations choose to offer new shares to the public when the market is near a peak. For technical discussion of these issues, see Lamont's "Evaluating Value Weighting: Corporate Events and Market Timing" and Schultz's "Pseudo Market Timing and the Long-Run Performance of IPOs" (p. 139).

I have not read these papers. It make sense that companies will do more IPOs when there is a high demand for equity issues so they may lower their cost of capital. I suppose one could argue market peaks near times when there is fervent demand for new issues.

Graham, B., Zweig J. (2006) The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) HarperCollins Publishers. NY, NY.

u/adonzil · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

>He even wrote a book on how he does it.

He hasn't written a book. He has written shareholder letters. What you might be thinking of is The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham who was Buffett's mentor at Columbia.

u/altfiv3 · 2 pointsr/stocks

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661
(.pdf version could be found online free)

Fee Free Investing:
loyal3.com
robinhood.com

Disagree with Irwin-- I noticed investing in stocks is something rich people do. Even the young ones because I noticed this while in college. I'd say if you're concerned about increasing your wealth you're concerned about the correct issue;

happy trails

u/Les79 · 2 pointsr/stocks

The best book I've ever read on investing. Will be reading it again soon.

u/Sloth_loves_Chunks · 2 pointsr/finance

I initially read The Intelligent Investor around the same time in my life and struggled getting through the whole book - you are definitely not alone in that aspect.

Although the book is considered by many to be 'the bible' on Value Investing this is not to say that it resonates as well, or at all, from those who approach the book from a technical analysis or quant basis etc. Given the stage you are currently at it would make more sense to spend time reading some smaller books on various investment styles to work out which resonates with you and then do a deeper dive into the relevant field.

In saying that - if you still feel inspired to work through The Intelligent Investor pick up the newer annotated version (http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661) which has some recent case studies/examples which tie Ben Graham's world a little more closely with 2016. If you are still finding it hard going just put the book down and come back to it in 6 months, it may be all you need or alternatively re-read it again (it took me till my second reading to really understand what was being said).

u/Erdos_0 · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Start off by reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

u/ExisDiff · 2 pointsr/Bitcoin

I think you need to decide if you want to be more of an investor or a speculator. I don't really have advice for speculators.

If you want to be an investor, I have found these books useful; Economics in one lesson is good, and if you are really keen The intelligent investor.

These books are highly focused on fundamentals of the economy and investing in something that help you think to recognise the fundamental reasons why something is or could become valuable, and not fall in the emotional pitfalls by speculating on emotional impulse based of a graph, media soundbites and reddit fomo and fud.

When you understand the fundamental reasons for a (un)healthy economy and currency first, then it should hopefully become clear why the fundamentals/monetary properties of bitcoin - once you learn those - can contribute to a much healthier economy and why has to potential to become very valuable itself.

I'd suggest to also research articles that teach you about 'the origins of money'. A useful take-away to realise is, is that historically money has always been attempted to be forged. A currency that has a monetary property that is extremely difficult forge, has more potential value.

u/kneelbeforeshawn · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

www.fidelity.com has a good learning center that has topics that are organized from beginner to advanced. After you get your bearings you should check out The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

u/ArnoldChase · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

IF you are trying to maximize your rate of return, you should be maximizing your 401(k) contributions up to the matching limit. Otherwise, you are passing up FREE GUARANTEED money. You can then invest this money in a low cost index fund offered by your plan administrator by using dollar cost averaging. The bottom line is that if you really are solely motivated by getting the highest rate of return, you should be maxing out your contributions to your 401(k), but only to the matching limit.

After reading all of your posts here, I think that you need to be honest with yourself about your motivations with this money. If you just want to play around in the stock market, that's fine. But know the difference between "maximizing returns for the long run" and playing in the stock market.

Don't get me wrong, I have money that I invest in the stock market that is separate than what is in my IRA/401(k). Some money I do not feel comfortable kissing good-bye until I'm in my 60s. I sense that you feel the same way. But you have to realize the consequences of not putting that money away (i.e. paying taxes on capital gains AND giving up FREE MONEY through contributions.)

So in the end, if you seriously want to maximize returns in the long run:

  1. Max out 401(k) contributions to the matching limit, then
  2. Max out a Roth IRA to the contribution limits, only then
  3. Invest via a traditional taxable account.
  4. Use dollar cost averaging in those accounts to buy low cost index funds as repeatedly recommended by Warren Buffett or, if you want to put in more time to your investing, read The Intelligent investor by Ben Graham as repeatedly recommended by Warren Buffett.

    Best of luck!
u/marginally-marginal · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

While this is not /r/investing, below are some suggestions which may be relevant. FYI, I work at an asset mgmt firm and run the credit/risk team.

You won't get rich, but what a fantastic gift. It's a good thing you have someone to help you begin thinking in those terms, but "investing in the stock market" is a broad concept.

First thing to remember is that you are at a disadvantage when it comes to "investing in stocks". Period. You will likely not pick big winners so what you likely want to do is to to avoid picking losers. With your limited background, if you want to "invest in your future", with that amount of money you may be better off selecting a mutual fund or an ETF that fits the amount of risk you are willing to take.

Next, since you are young the general guidance is to take on as much "intelligent risk" as possible. Take that rule of thumb with a grain of salt though. Everyone's risk tolerance is different. For instance, even when I was younger I was always "risk averse" and so invested more like a 50 year old. I preferred (and still do) equities from larger companies, proven cash flow, decent business strategy (what are typically called "Large Cap" stocks) and the debt (bonds) of companies which were more marginal and risky...whereas my peers loved Qualcom, WorldCom, Medtronic. So, we all are different...remember that. Never "bet" with money you can't lose. Investing in individual companies it not unlike going to a casino, but I always like to mention the caveat is that you can stack the risk cards in your favor with some investments.

If you really like the "idea" of investing and want to use this money to learn about how to do that best, take $15 and buy this book. Learning about investing is first an exercise in understanding the risks you are willing to take and find and analyze companies which have a risk profile lower than that but can grow at a rate you are comfortable with.

While there are a plethora of books on the market from Jim Cramer, Motley Fool, etc...the fact is, when it comes to investing in the equity of companies, The Intelligent Investor will help you set a baseline for the cash flow analysis of companies. Every analyst, nearly every PM, many risk managers and most decent MBA grad's that I know all have that book close at hand. I'm looking at a worn copy on my bookshelf right now.

Graham ain't sexy, high flying nor dramatic. Graham doesn't have fancy "sportscenter" type graphs you see on CNBC nor does it carry the vitriol you find on Fox Business News. But, it is an introduction into the basics of everything any intelligent investor strives to find: Companies who have the potential to grow at a level you are targeting while carrying lower risk relative to their peers.

None of what I mention above talks about "momentum" investing, technical analysis, algorithm's, options, hedging or any other method that isn't basic. As a new investor, you owe it to yourself to first learn "why" you are investing and then, my suggestion is, allow Graham to give you the initial "how" you should invest.

u/ob5310 · 2 pointsr/StockMarket

> What are some ways of identifying which stock to go after? Are there any particularly useful websites you use that help with this?

With only 1k using questrade you definitely shouldn't be actively trading like other people recommend. Even investing your entire account into one trade will cost you 1% ($5 on the buy, $5 on the sell) so it'll be impossible. Figure out if you want to be growth oriented or value oriented. Growth stocks are more expensive from a valuation perspective and have huge potential but also huge risk. Think of Facebook, Tesla, Netflix. Value stocks are stocks believed to have strong fundamentals and trade at a cheap valuation. These are a lot less exciting and generally lower risk/reward but can be the foundation for a stable long term portfolio. If you genuinely want to get into investing, read http://www.amazon.ca/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661 pretty much the bible for investing. Also be weary of technical trading and patterns etc, people often fall into the trap of seeing something in complete randomness. Personally I'm a value investor and I work in equity research so studying companies is what I do for a living.

u/eatbroccoli · 2 pointsr/teslainvestorsclub

CNN article from 1999; took a quick scan. I suggest you read this if you haven't: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

Keep in mind predicting the future is impossible, technology is advancing, and EVs are the future. You deleting that troll account of yours anytime soon? Or still trying to drag human progress down with any negative fluff you can muster?

u/ScroogeJones · 2 pointsr/StockMarket

Are you newer to investing? Not judging, just offering tools to become more knowledgeable!

If you are check out the following:

The Intelligent Investor: this is a classic book on investing, a must read - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060555661/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Pgh9Bb44B9X7W

The Simple Path to Wealth: NOT A GET RICH QUICK SCHEME. might not be everyone's cup of tea, but a great quick read. Good for retirement and more of a passive investment - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_6ih9BbYWRWH38

u/throwaway32932923932 · 2 pointsr/investing

OP I have a degree in finance and I'd like to provide the counterweight to this sub. Please take the time to read my comments, despite the inevitable unpopularity of my advice:


  • Try to think of the initiatives of the average investor here. Chances are they are a 20-something guy with a computer science degree, who's following the circle-jerk strategy of 'put all in S&P 500' because of fear of taking responsibility for their financial decisions. That helps them sleep at night. The easiest thing to do to just keep throwing your money at S&P, but seldom the easiest solution is the best one. I don't know of anyone with a understanding of economics or finance who follows this strategy, as nicely put as the only book this sub reads.

  • Don't read pop-economics/investing books. While doing your degree, try to read more books like international finance and less books targeted at pop-culture like the intelligent investor. The former gives you an understanding of the economy, the later gives you some feel-good advice to parrot.

  • There are signs of drop in the market. I'd advise you to read opinions of renowned economics like Shiller, Krugman and the like. Subscribe to the financial times and the economist and with time you'd get a pretty good picture. But in order to asses your risk properly you will have to know the theory and hit the books. From the top of my head, Shiller P/E has something like 60% correlation with future market returns. Given the current valuations of S&P the current historical 10-y return is 1-2%, not 7% like the /r/investing-ors are hoping. Since people expect 7%, but the fundamentals predict 1-2%, that difference has to come in the form of a stagnation or a crash.

  • Now long term: Is 1-2% better then cash? Yeah. Is it better then just dumping your money in Poland instead? No. The point is not to choose between "in S&P, out cash" and "out S&P, in cash" the point to choose between the 1000s of options and find the one that gets you the best return.

  • why am I writing a comment that will have negative karma return, you may ask? Because I once got a guy in the right way through my rants, and he wrote me later to thank me. That felt good. So I guess I'm hoping to hammer some more common sense into someone else.
u/ProphetChuck · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

I'd say start simple at first, maybe use Elizabeth Warrens 50/30/20 rule as a guideline? You stated you had no debt, so you could adjust it to your needs.

I'd also check out all banks available in Czechoslovakia and open current/savings accounts with the highest interest rate.

To be honest, before you even set foot on the stock market, I would first read [The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham,] (https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486391896&sr=8-1&keywords=intelligent+investor) it will guide you well.

Other subs you should consider are

/r/financialindependence
and /r/investing.






u/treeperfume · 2 pointsr/Philippines

I highly recommend these books:

  • The Intelligent Investor - I owe everything to this book.
  • Stocks for the Long Run - Incredibly well researched book on global markets.

    Madali lang kumita sa stocks. Madali din malugi :). Ginawa ko yung /r/phinvest a few years ago, pero hindi ko na halos nabibisita. May mga pinost ako doon na intro stuff sa investing at stocks.
u/skatelate · 2 pointsr/stocks

Funny, I just had a conversation with a buddy about this. From 2005-2015 I spent a TON of time in researching and trading FX. Similar to most traders, I blew up a a couple small accounts (~5k total losses) and then spent a few years looking for a holy grail trading strategy. I really enjoyed the challenge of FX because it forces you to be in tune with world economies and interest rates but, even after a decade, I had trouble being consistently profitable (granted I did have some severe periods of trading ADD) During that time however, I did study a lot of technical analysis and became pretty good at very short term price action scalping. My problem was that I could just never reach the point in FX where I felt confident enough to throw money down the gauntlet again, no matter how well I did in paper/demo accounts.

In 2015, after watching some friends making easy money in stocks while I was doing brain surgery on the EUR/USD, I decided I would start spending more time studying stocks and doing some stock demo/paper trading. Turns out it was MUCH easier for me to look at a company's earnings/filings for fundamentals and then read the price action day to day. Maybe also because with FX there are SO many things influencing the direction of the dollar on any given day. For me, it made trading a micro/small cap much easier to read in terms of straight price action/volume. IMO FX is the perfect training ground to build solid TA skills.

It wasn't until May 2018 that I decided I would start trading stocks seriously. Of course, that turned out to be not the best time to start trading stocks! BUT, I think the years I spent in FX helped prevent me from getting into any really bad/overvalued positions. So far I've built up an initial 8.5k into ~103k. A long ways to go toward being a 'pro' but showing consistent profitability (for now at least).

EDIT: Point of clarification regarding my balance, I should note that once I showed some profitability, I began making additional deposits to my account (which now account for an additional 16.5k). I’ve posted screenshots and deposit history here

I consider myself a 'trader' not an 'investor' and I think you can do that with stocks just as easily as you can with FX. You just need to know more about the fundamentals/drivers of price on whichever company you're trading at vs the economic implications on currency. Really just adapting what you know to a different market. Same thing goes for switching to futures/options. When I switched over to stocks, I started with a lot of the value investing classics like The Intelligent Investor and others in the Grahm/Buffet realm, just to get an idea for valuation and long term strategies that have worked for the most successful. Depending on your trading/investing style you can drill down from there.

​

​

u/shantmelikian · 2 pointsr/weedstocks

Just look at the right side of r/weedstocks forum... if you scroll down enough you will see these :

GUIDES AND MARKET RESOURCES

  • A Beginner's Guide to Investing
  • The Intelligent Investor
  • Investopedia

    You can start there.

    Plus you can search content on this sub for new investors. A lot of people are nice enough and try to help new investors. Only bit of advice I can give you is do not FOMO (Fear of missing out). Always do your own DD (Due diligence) before investing. Take peoples advice with a grain of salt.
u/xamomax · 2 pointsr/investing

Now would be a very good time to read the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham". This book is old maybe even some of it is out of date, but the general gist of it is sound. Benjamin Graham is a friend / mentor for Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors of all time.

I would also recommend the "dummies" series of books, as they help a lot with the mechanics and fundamentals of investing in a way that is not all biassed and weird.

I say this because that's how I got started, and though I feel still like a total noob fool, I have managed to do amazingly well over the last 10-ish or so years by patiently looking for opportunities and following the advice of these books.


u/calp · 2 pointsr/ValueInvesting

I finished Buffettology a couple of weeks back. Great book - really informative and gives a useful model for thinking about things.

Here are some other things I have read and enjoyed:

  • Intelligent Investor. Obviously a widely recommended book. I found Jason Zweig's edition with commentary quite useful - though his comments sometimes contradict the original text and are anyway pretty obsessed with the fallout of the dotcom boom. That said his additions are journalistic and so easier and easier to read that Graham's original prose.
  • Why Stocks Go Up and Down. I know a bit about accounting and finance but this book really explains the effect on equities (and also explains bonds). I need to review some of the later chapters

    I'm currently reading Value Investing Made Easy. /u/moumouren also recommended me The Warren Buffett Way which is sitting on my desk now.

    I'm not an expert though - like you I am just starting - so take all this with a grain of salt. Just some ideas.
u/nopingonthat · 2 pointsr/personalfinance

Honestly, if that's all you have in savings, don't play with it. That's not a lot. I'm an older person and have had decades to accumulate enough to put small amounts into stocks.

If you do want to learn about the stock market, I recommend The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661 and maybe the Motley Fool guides. Another thing you can do is visit the Vanguard.com page and the etrade.com page and read whatever free articles you can access.

If you do want to get a toe in, the way I started was to open a Vanguard "Star" fund. I also was working in tech and would take advantage of my company's stock purchase plan (ESPP). I'd get the stock at a discount twice a year and sell it immediately, getting a slightly under 15% return every six months on the small amount I put in.

u/ChasingDucks · 2 pointsr/stocks

It's vague because there's not really a magical get rich quick formula. Investing mostly takes time - basically waiting for the company you bought to sell products and then give you the money. The allure of fast rising stocks is very tempting, and while it may get you rich very quickly, it can also cut your account in half very quickly.

Investopedia will have the basic tenets - buy low, sell high, don't pay too much for a company.

A more detailed version would be "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/EdwardDupont · 2 pointsr/investing

Look you may want to open a TD Ameritrade account. It has great tools and a lot of videos on education. I don't think there is a minimum but I could be wrong. They also have a great platform for novice and pro. Some on /r/investing may think eTrade is better. I've never used it.


A great book for you to buy is "The Intelligent Investor". Link. A lot of people will say time in the market is better than timing the market so if you would really like to get things on the role while you learn how to invest try looking at older companies with a great history, i.e. blue chip companies.

A great app for you to get is Robin Hood which does not have any commission fees, whereas TD Ameritrade will take $9.99 from you on any buy and sell and that adds up quick.

u/mcstutter · 1 pointr/stocks

Warren Buffett's favorite book is The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham, specifically chapters 8 and 20.

That won't teach you much about bid/ask spreads though, so I would start with the Education section of whatever brokerage you are using, or Wikipedia.

u/DarkRider23 · 1 pointr/personalfinance

Rent seems a little high, but it might be the location. If that works for you, then so be it. You seem to know how to budget, so there's no point in giving you the spiel about how you might not be able to make it work.

Since you're good at saving money, the next step is to learn how to invest it. There's no point (IMO) in having $48k sitting in a checking account if you're not planning on any major purchases soon. You might as well let that money work for you. The 2 books I would suggest are The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias and The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Reading Andrew first is a great intro to investing and then Graham gets a bit more technical, IMO, so reading them in that order would probably be best.

If you want the general guidelines of what to do with money if you are saving it, then it is as follows:

  1. Match your employers 401k contribution.

  2. Max out your ROTH IRA

  3. Max out your 401k if you have any left over money.

    Step 4 varies from person to person. Some people prefer maxing out their HSA account and using it as a "super ROTH IRA" and then sending left over money to their brokerage account. Others prefer just putting the extra money into their brokerage account and into taxable investments right off the bat. It's all up to you.

    Edit - Forgot to put an emergency fund as one of the steps. Have about 3-6 months worth of expenses sitting in the highest rate account you can find just in case shit hits the fan.
u/akaganyaku · 1 pointr/AskWomen

The Intelligent Investor, it's pretty dry, but WOW really teaches you about investing and changes your perspective on your finances

u/flitcroft · 1 pointr/finance

Check the links in the sidebar of /r/investing. Most people tell beginners to start with Khan Academy and reading the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. It is the guide Warren Buffet points everyone too, regardless of experience. Also, NASDAQ has a good resource here.

I own a condo and have experience in equities, bonds, and options and for what it's worth I'd point you towards the latter if you don't want to live in the home. I don't think of rental properties as good investments, all things considered. It may be worth getting professional advice from someone in real estate to talk through the scenario. The investment side of the scenario has pluses and minuses that are much more widely known.

Here's a (grossly simplified) article from CNN Money that looks at the two investment options. The average return for equities vs real estate was 13.4% to 8.6% from 1974 to 2004, according to the article. That's 56% higher for the markets!

Finally, I'll throw out a wild card if you like the idea of a tangible investment like a single family home or duplex -- check out buying a coin operated laundry business. They're cheap, they often qualify for SBA loans, and they provide lots of free cash flow. Businesses in high rental areas seem to do best. There are tons for sale all over the country and many on Craigslist. Here's an example. That's about as much as I know about these but I've done the numbers and some have 30% annual return on equity. It could be quite the little side business if things work out in your favor. Just a thought :)

u/TomahawkChopped · 1 pointr/investing

I'm going to give you the pathway that I read that has me where I am today, its mostly going to steer you towards dollar cost averaging and passive management, but the easing of exposure to alternative strategies was invaluable and eventually brought me to value investing. Dollar cost averaging in low cost index funds is the training wheels of investing and should be the way every novice investor starts IMO.

  1. The Wealthy Barber - this is the sesame street book on investing and everyone should read it when they're starting. It'll expose you to the ideas of dollar cost averaging, low fee index funds, and the importance of using TIME as your biggest asset in slow growing your net worth. Its like $6 and 100 pages, you can read it in afternoon. http://www.amazon.com/The-Wealthy-Barber-Updated-Edition/dp/0761513116

  2. The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing - if you want to skip the previous book and go straight to this one that would make sense, they cover much of the same info but this one is written by John Bogle (founder of Vanguard) and very much pushes the idea of low cost indexed mutual funds as the only way the casual investor has a chance. If you read the wealthy barber, you'll be a little bored with this book, so take your pick. http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing/dp/0470102101/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425572242&sr=1-1&keywords=John+boggle

  3. A Random Walk Down Wall Street - its been recommended several other times in the thread and I recommend it too, but not as a starter book, read one of the two books above first. The ideas presented in Random Walk are a bit more advanced and will begin to expose you to the ideas and methods of identifying risk and diversity in a portfolio, such as alpha, beta, mordern portfolio theory, and discounting. In the end the book is going to push the novice towards low cost passively managed index funds, as it should IMHO. Absolutely worth reading once you have built a small nest egg.

    At this point if you've taken a year or two or more to invest using what you learned in the above books you'll have a better idea of what you really want to start doing with you're money. Perhaps its value investing, and now it starts to get more technical.

  4. The Little Book of Valuation - Good intro to valuing companies that begins getting into the technicalities of analyzing balance sheets. If you think this is the route you want to go then give it a read, but not until you've read the books above and cut your teeth for a year or two managing your money and exercising good decision making and patience with dollar cost averaging. http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Valuation-Company-Profit/dp/1118004779/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425572657&sr=1-1&keywords=The+little+book+of+valuation

  5. The Intelligent Investor - now you're really ready to dive into the details of a companies financials to determine its worth in 5-10 years. This book by Benjamin Graham (warren Buffet's mentor) is the go to book on value investing, and I take this review seriously: "“By far the best book on investing ever written.” (Warren Buffett)". Do NOT start here, you'll just be confused, bored and frustrated. http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=la_B000APZXBQ_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425575056&sr=1-1

    By this point you'll no longer be an investment padawan and be well on your way to a master of the force. Do not be tempted by the dark side of day trading and penny stocks. Much fear there. There is no need for level 2 quotes with value investing because you're relying on your due dilligence from the previous years and quarters to take your portfolio higher, without worrying about the road bumps in the market today. You'll be able to happily live your life until the next quarter or two when its time to reevaluate and rebalance your portfolio.

    Good luck.
u/gopher33j · 1 pointr/Bitcoin

In the states I would send you to Vanguard.com for investing. Coinbase or something similar for BTC.

Honestly. Read "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. Came out YEARS ago, but it is a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661

Finance.google.com is a good simple website to keep up to tabs on everything financial.

u/nemetzj · 1 pointr/stocks

One fundamental book I would recommend if you have the financial literacy is The Intelligent Investor by Graham. The book does assume that you understand what stocks and bonds are and how they fundamentally work.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347416372&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor

As for other resources I would recommend that you learn all about stock fundamentals first. (ex reading balance sheets, earnings per share, ect.). I would also recommend that you look for patterns in stocks on a site like marketwatch.com. Look at stocks that have had huge runs like Walmart (WMT) and stocks that have had huge declines like Facebook (FB) and figure out why they moved these directions. (WMT has had increasing earnings and positive momentum/ FB had a disappointing earnings report and a discouragingly high P/E as well as negative momentum)

u/structurallyengineer · 1 pointr/investing

The best two books anyone worth their salt would recommend are The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis....in that order.

u/PotatosAreDelicious · 1 pointr/investing

Read here before you start investing.
Instead of timing the market I would make monthly contributions for the next year or so. Jumping in with 100k at once might bite you. Consider doing a bulk buy of 20k into a portfolio of stocks/indexes/bonds and then contributing 5-10k of your remaining balance once a month or every other month over the next year or two. Diversifying as you go. Every 6 months to a year re balance your portfolio back to your initial diversification percentages.
Try and put your current income into the plan as well. You should be investing with your extra income and you can turn this pot into something worthwhile. Maybe an early retirement. Who knows.

u/nstano · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

If you want to learn more, I would absolutely say take courses on it. My friends who are engineers have mentioned a lot of companies look very favorably on engineers who have business/finance knowledge, especially if you want to move into management.

If you wanted a book to read, I'd recommend Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Graham was an investment professional in the early 1900s who managed to make money through the Great Depression in the stock market. In his later years, he taught a finance class at Columbia and according to legend only one student ever got an A in that class, and that student was Warren Buffet. Look for an updated edition, as the book was written in the late 1960s, so some of the examples are pretty dated. This is the version I have. It looks like there is a newer revised edition too.

If you like podcasts (I am a huge podcast junkie), the podcasts from The Motley Fool are good and not very technical. Vanguard also puts out good podcasts, but those are a bit more technical. Planet Money from NPR is a good one that covers topics in economics in a way that is both interesting and engaging.

If you're a student, you can get a great deal on a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, which now includes a digital subscription iirc. I had it all through college, and it was a great resource. Seriously, it's $50 for the year. It's worth it.

u/Leonardo_Da_PinchMe · 1 pointr/personalfinance

The best place to start if you really want to get into investing is the classic, "The Intelligent Investor", by Ben Graham (he has another book called "Security Analysis", but it's very dense and some of the info in it is pretty dated, even though it has been updated a bunch of times). Graham was the mentor for Warren Buffett, who, if you don't know who he is, is widely regarded to be one of the greatest investors ever. The book has been around for a long time and has gone through a number of editions, but the principles have stood the test of time. Also, there was an edition that was updated by Jason Zweig, a financial writer: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451140254&sr=1-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor

A caveat though: if you want to be very successful at investing, it requires fairly serious commitment, with regularly staying current on the state of your portfolio, going through financial statements, (not as hard as it sounds, but it requires learning and discipline), and understanding the economic environment the companies you're investing in are facing. And maybe more important than any of that is discipline; it takes a lot of guts to make decisions when your money is involved and you're sometimes going against the crowd.

The other two resources I would check out are, The Motley Fool, who generally put a lighthearted and fun spin on investing, but also take a value based approach (not strict value investing, but they are focused on company fundamentals more than typical Wall Street chatter). And Index Funds: If it turns out that you don't want to spend time every week reading financial statements or, at the bare minimum, Value Line reports, Index Fund investing is a great way to get into the market in a highly diversified way that doesn't require the same rigor that individual stock investing does. (Also, look at ETFs with regard to Index Funds, as they tend to be lower cost than investing in the fund itself -- Exchange Traded Funds are basically mutual funds you can buy like a stock, as opposed to traditional mutual funds, which you invest in by opening an account with the mutual fund company itself).

u/ryanakron · 1 pointr/stocks

When you go to the DIDG website it says:

Digidev, (Digital Development Group) is a Los Angeles, California based business which provides a seamless, scalable and integrated back-end technological solution giving content owners distribution capability across multiple platforms using existing Internet Protocol (IP) services, providing increased monetization opportunities and greater control over distribution.

However the 2011 10K filing says:

We are a start-up mineral company in the pre-exploration stage and have not generated any operating revenues since inception. We
have incurred losses since inception and our auditors have issued a going concern opinion since we must raise additional capital,
through the sale of our securities, in order to fund our operations. There can be no assurance we will be able to raise this capital.


It also says that they ran out of credit to put money into the business. It seems pretty sketchy. 99.9999999999% of stocks under a dollar are scams with $0 intrinsic value that uneducated people buy and then lose all their money.

Go read The Intelligent Investor and learn how to invest, not speculate. It may make you reconsider your current holdings as well.

Good luck!

u/tomathon · 1 pointr/Economics

For an introduction into two COMPLETELY different styles of investing strategies, check out
A Random Walk Down Wall Street
and The Intelligent Investor

These are essentially the two different extreme strategy of playing the same game. Of course not one is necessarily more correct than the other, but I personally think value investing has more merit than the random walk theory.

u/2comment · 1 pointr/asktrp

Buy a little gold or silver (I think silver is cheaper in comparison) in form of coins, not certificates. Do not buy them all in one place because faking is a problem (China). Test them. Buy slowly over time. I'd say eventually 3-5% net worth. Hide them well, in several spots (not just in bank safe deposits though some can go there) and disguise them. This is less an investment and more of portable reserve in case paper money goes to shit. Several thousand fiat currencies have gone this way, the USD/Euro/etc will be no exception, only question is when.

>Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero

— Voltaire

The rest I would split between stocks and real estate. Rental properties are a good steady income. Stocks are growth but also a huge gamble and it can go to shit at any time. Any investment will have pitfalls, and the pitfalls will be different. That's why you want to diversify, if the stock market goes to shit, you want something that can ride it out. If real estate goes to shit, you can fall on your stocks. Etc. There are several other options (bonds) and right now the stock market is very overheated imo, particularly the myriad of web/tech stocks with P/E over 60, but Idk much about those other markets.

When you buy into things, do it at a steady pace to avoid massive peaks (although you can miss the dips too, unfortunately) and average out your buy-in.

This is Warren Buffett's favorite book, old but good to read.

I wouldn't say don't listen to anything by Tim Ferris but take everything he says with a huge grain of salt. He hasn't had a 4h work week in his life. He works very hard from what I heard, but what he works hard at is selling people dreams. Specifically that you can have it all.

Live modestly.

u/retrospectr3 · 1 pointr/Entrepreneur

I plug this book constantly but it deserves every bit of it's already enormous reputation, but The Intelligent Investor is one of the most useful books you could read.

It talks directly about stock market investing but offers a ton of wisdom that teaches you how to view any investment in general.

u/huge_clock · 1 pointr/investing

>I have a general theory that ~95% of the people recommending this book either did not read it or did not understand it when they did.

Ahh, but let us seperate the difference between a good theory and speculation.

A good theory is one which, upon thorough analysis promises a high probability of being proven true. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculation.

Does your theory rest on the merits, facts and content contained within the pages therein? Can your theory be falsified or is it speculation?

Let us analyze your conjecture and see if it holds any water.

  • Amazon says The intelligent investor has an average rating of 4.6 on 242 reviews and is the #1 best seller in its category: https://www.amazon.ca/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Value-Investing/dp/0060555661 Could it be that all these reviewers have not read the book? Well it seems almost all the reviews have verified purchased and offer specific quotes in their review. The evidence does seem to support the speculative assertion that 95% of people did not read the intelligent investor.
  • Let's go to investopedia.com where The intelligent investor ranks #1 as the undisputed best investment book of all time: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/050803.asp Could it be that the Investopedia editorial team reviewed all investment books but forgot to read the Intelligent Investor? I would find that to be a highly speculative theory.
  • What if we look to see what books other professional investors have recommended: https://www.thewaystowealth.com/investing/best-investing-books/ By far and away the Intelligent investor reigns supreme. Is it more likely that these investment gurus chose not to read the Intelligent investor and yet recommend it, in some sort of cabal conspiracy?

    Instead of speculating that no one has read the Intelligent Investor, let us borrow some principles from Ben Graham. It seems overwhelmingly based on all the available evidence and after sound and rational observation and analysis that the Intelligent Investor could be a good book! Now in order to justify reading this book, I would need a margin of safety that the book offered value beyond the cost of reading it and the time to complete it. Well at $10 for a paperback copy and an estimated 3-4 day read I have to say I think those criteria have been met! The intelligent investor is a buy!
u/BugsSuck · 1 pointr/wallstreetbets

For a lot of my basic knowledge I browsed investopedia and clicked on anything blue I didn't understand and held legitimate conversations with peers both on and off of reddit.

For example, take this submission about CDOs

Just start reading. If you don't understand something that's highlighted, like "derivatives" or "defaults", click on it and read that page. This can help you understand a lot of the technical terms and see how they're all related to one another.

I don't read many investing books as much as I try to absorb things about economics itself. Understanding how an economy functions is essential to trading. A good youtube channel that talks about economics can be found here. The videos are dense in information, but the input the creator gives is very solid. Not all of what he says should be taken as fact, but really it's just an analysis by a fundamentally sound economist.

Netflix has a few documentaries that are captivating. One is called Betting on Zero

The series "Dirty Money" has some interesting content within as well.

The Big Short is a movie that has valuable content if you watch it while considering what we know in hindsight of the 2008 financial crisis.

The most important part of investing is understanding what stimulates an economy or drives one into a recession.

My father is a successful investment banker and the two books he's always recommended are:

The Intelligent Investor

The Millionaire Next Door

u/BoomerKeith · 1 pointr/personalfinance

Just to add to the book list, there's an old book (that has been revised over the years) called The Intelligent Investor. MUST READ for anyone getting started!

u/exxk · 1 pointr/stocks

Yeah go for it, it looks like a good starting point. Haven't read that one personally but the reviews look good enough. (Although i would still recommend (https://www.amazon.de/Intelligent-Investor-Benjamin-Graham/dp/0060555661/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E8GWZJ82X1VQ0A590ZF3)

u/tits_out_forTheBoys · 1 pointr/TheRedPill

Read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor. Buy the 4th Edition with Jason Zweig's commentary.

That book will provide you with some of the best core knowledge about investing in the stock market, and more importantly, the necessary mindset for investing successfully. So when you're done reading it you'll know where to look for applicable information, which fund managers to follow, etc. But it starts off with that book.

u/snowdog74 · 1 pointr/personalfinance

These make me wary for a few reasons.... I won't go into all of the reasons and I need to preface this by saying that I am not a financial advisor, but a corporate finance analyst so I am not "advising" you in any sense on what decision to make.

A couple of concerns I have about these two funds are:

One is that their best and worst years do not do any better than the historical average of the overall S&P.

Another is that some of their largest holdings are things like E*Trade and other financial conglomerates whose businesses may be difficult to value.

I think that the fund managers appear to still be stuck on using price-to-earnings ratios as part of their triangulation of value, and they appear to be selecting stocks that leave very little of what Graham called a "margin of safety".

It's dangerous for you to take advice in bits and pieces and then act on it. That's like trying to learn to build the Golden Gate Bridge by watching Youtube Videos on the various aspects of bridge building and then thinking yourself to be fully equipped to erect something structurally sound.... that's not how investment analysis works.

If you want a starting point to understand more of the fundamentals, while still sitting on index funds, I would recommend reading Graham's book, The Intelligent Investor.

You can learn a tremendous amount about the general classes of investments and the general mindset of value investing, what value investors look for.... but I still would come back to this one thing: Why make it complicated for yourself. Index funds take the guesswork out of it for you, and average a moderate amount of risk for a moderate return.

One does not succeed by generating stellar returns year in and year out, but rather by insulating your principal against catastrophic losses and allowing your principal therefore to compound.... This effect, the Time Value of Money, is the single most important principle you can learn.

As Warren Buffett is noted for saying, in a comment about the folly of losing principal while trying to chase larger returns, "Any number times zero is still zero."

u/TeamToken · 1 pointr/brisbane

There is a world of information available generally but the consensus by thinking Economists/Finance experts is that Value investing, when done right (and there are a LOT of variables in that) has been consistently the best strategy to get decent returns over the long term. It’s made Warren Buffett who he is.

A caveat, developing a decent strategy and knowing what to look for takes a long time and quite a bit of patience (and discipline!). The intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham should be required reading by anyone starting out.

Other than, as others have said, index funds have offered solid long term returns and are relatively low risk.

u/TheRearguard · 1 pointr/investing

Here is a random article I found about stock simulators.

How do you like to learn things? There are tons of books, podcasts and blogs about investing. Here are some popular ones or ones that I have read and used

  • Books
  • Blogs
  • Podcasts
    • Money Tree Podcast -- pretty poor production quality but good general stuff.
    • There are tons of others, Google it.

      Warren Buffett famously/supposedly read every book in the financial section at the library by age 12--I think the important thing to take from that is you are still young and have tons of free time and aside from starting to invest as soon as you can (you can usually start as soon as you have earned income) you should be investing in yourself...getting good grades, figuring out what you want to do after high school, trying out businesses, learning marketable skills (e.g., coding, good writing skills, good interpersonal skills, good organizational skills, etc).

      Good Luck!
u/jflowers · 1 pointr/BitcoinMarkets

http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661

This was one of those books that really got me thinking - there's a few more that come to mind ... Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits.

All of these books basically center around how to decouple emotion from the act of investing; hence, why these books are still powerful decades after being first published.

Sounds like you're not going out on the streets because of this - which is great. But, it sounds like you're kicking yourself in the butt (which you really shouldn't.) I recall the dot com glory days. I was in grad school, using this brand new website called e-trade and investing in all the companies whose products I used (sandisk, etc). Just making bank (on paper), it felt great. I thought that I understood the mechanics of the market but when things began to go sideways for me - I too hodl'ed.

Out from the ashes comes the phoenix... So take this as a learnable moment. Mine cost me dearly as well (sounds like more actually - if that helps ;-) ), but from the most expensive of all teachers (experience) I did walk away with new tools. So when fresh opportunities arose, I was in a better position to analysis, understand, and control myself to take fuller advantage of these gems...

Personally I think that we are really just beginning to see the power behind bitcoin and would suggest hodling. I'm sure that many will say that's a bad idea (perhaps so.) I'd also recommend paying off everything as quickly as possible and stopping any/all future trades - at least until such time that you feel more confident and comfortable in doing so. I feel that any further trades may result in compounding these feelings of dread and you may also regret them in the (long term) future.

Putting this aside to give yourself time to recalibrate is probably best.

u/SovArya · 1 pointr/investing

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661


Well yes, I do promote the book because I everyone should read it, but if you do a google search there are pdf available for free. :) I like the first edition best since it's really easy to read.

​

If you want to use a screener, something that is free and available then that's ok too. I mean I believe stock investing is a personal journey; so you decide for yourself what you want. And accept all consequences because you chose it.

u/splat313 · 1 pointr/SecurityAnalysis

I have http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661 and have no complaints about it. It is based off of Graham's 1973 edition, and every chapter has a followup chapter written by Zweig in 2003. The followup chapters are really nice and help show which sections are outdated and which are really important

u/dance2finance · 1 pointr/FinancialPlanning

I would recommend 2 amazing books for you to first get started:

  1. The 5 rules for successful stock investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market - https://www.amazon.com/Five-Rules-Successful-Stock-Investing/dp/0471269654

  2. The Intelligent Investor - https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

    These 2 books are touted as the "holy grail" of investment books and emphasizes a huge deal on teaching you how to do due diligence when you stock pick, rather than just picking stocks based on the "crowd".

    Hope this helps!
u/stev_meli · 1 pointr/AskReddit

Educate yourself first. Don't just throw your hat in the ring. Read some books like:

The Intelligent Investor

Common Sense on Mutual Funds

There are other books out there, but I can't recommend what I haven't read.

I would ask you, what do you wish to accomplish? Do you want to put your money somewhere and forget about it? Do you want to try to make some money?

A guy in your position, I would recommend a Roth IRA. It is a tax free investment (in the US anyway) you can set up for your retirement. If you start contributing now, it will grow over the course of your lifetime.

It is really up to you - but please educate yourself first.

u/Ovidestus · 1 pointr/stocks

I'm about the same age, and the first thing I did was to find some books about investment. I looked around google and found out that some certain books are "timeless", meaning they are always relevant (plenty on this sub suggested it too). I found out that "The Intelligent Investor", a book first published in 1949 (but of course revised and updated latest in 2006) to be quite important when starting with investment - Here's the amazon link. I doubt you could go wrong with it as a learning source.

But I can't say much - I am as much experienced as you. If you wait a little, some others with way more knowledge will suggest something better, probably.

Though you could look more, outside the wiki of this sub.

u/313miker · 1 pointr/PersonalFinanceCanada

I would suggest starting with index funds, such as vanguards Canadian s&p 500. Get your TFSA contributions and RRSP contributions filled up, and in the mean time learn as much as you can. I would suggest reading The Intelligent Investor. http://www.amazon.ca/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Value-Investing/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408572453&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor

Then you can decide if you want to try valuing companies for yourself, or if a more defensive approach is better for you. Good luck!

u/GreedyPhilanthropy · 1 pointr/financialindependence

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

If you're looking for actual investing, this one is the gold standard. Preface by Warren Buffett.

It really depends on your goals for which book is appropriate. Dave Ramsey, for example, is great for people who need to get out of debt, but I think he's absolutely terrible for investment opinions. Motley Fool is actually a decent one for investors.

Keep in mind that anyone giving tips on specific stocks will be wrong quite often, even if they're the best in the business. What you want to learn are the fundamentals.

u/kr4psnus · 1 pointr/personalfinance

It's great that you do not have any debt. It's always good to keep physical Gold and Silver for long term investments however, real estate may be a better option. Not sure where you live but for 15K in Houston TX you can buy your self a nice piece of land. Land down here appreciates well as many people are moving here.

You may also look into trading stocks, however if you are thinking of stocks look into Fundamental Analysis for long term growth. Don't mess around with Technical Analysis yet as its better suited for short term investments.

$5k can get you some good diversified stocks.

Read this book - https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/grasshoppa80 · 1 pointr/personalfinance

To first answer question above, sounds like they invest in company but you have every right to re-balance as suited. And re-balancing is something you should do once, MAX twice a year.

We do it just once at the end of the year, and forget about it until then (unless we receive a letter that X fund is being replaced).

Anyone interested in a good investment read, and fresh off the boat in regards to Wall Street- I'd suggest "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffets teacher). Great book that references old corporations and compares/contrasts them to companies nowadays. And provides ways/what to look for if you want to dabble in individual stock investments. Cheap on ebay/amazon too...

Regarding investing in a company, my wife has a decent plan with her company. Nice balance of large-, mid-, sm-cap's (bonds/internationals too), some indexes etc, but also the chance to invest in the company.

Agree with most redditors here, diversification is essential and key to not overloading/losing it all at once (i.e. Enron).

However, we do invest max 2% (or 3) of her contribution with company stock. I don't think it's too harsh to invest a very modest amount with the company; as long as you feel they're large enough/stable to be around for 10-20-30 years etc (it's one of top 5 media companies in the US).

Good luck!!

u/SeraphWings · 1 pointr/investing

Intelligent Investor:
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Practical/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310247044&sr=8-1

Do you have a basic understanding of finance/accounting? Present value, debits/credits, how to read financial statements? If not, I'd suggest any basic financial statement analysis textbook.

u/karlhungus · 1 pointr/investing

I read, and quite enjoyed that book myself; althoug i concur, his arguments against FA and TA are a bit weak. Would be nice to see statistacilly signifant results disproving them. I suppose this is difficult given how some pople consider themselves FA's and Merkel doesn't.

For the OP I thought The intelligent Investor was the defactor FA book...

u/bcrew · 1 pointr/investing

I believe you would like Mr. Ben Graham and some of his books like this one.

u/truegrit · 1 pointr/BitcoinMarkets

TA is like trying to paint of picture of how gravity works instead of defining it fundamentally with math. Get yourself a copy of The Intelligent Investor if you want to develop a proven investing framework.

u/betanajc · 1 pointr/phinvest

>I’m 20 right now with 1.5M in savings.

You have a great head start compared to most people! Don't squander the money. You'll realize 1.5M isn't that big soon enough, if you haven't already.

>While I really do appreciate the groundbreaking and insightful concepts that he introduces in his books, I feel like it doesn’t specifically teach you how to invest especially if you are an absolute beginner

Yes, I noticed this too but there was one crucial lesson he taught in the book that people miss - cashflow management. What did you learn about cashflow management?

Don't underestimate that lesson. It's literally the key to becoming and staying wealthy. It's probably more important than learning how to analyze a company's financial statement, forecast price movement, etc.

Once you feel like you're ready, go and study the different methods for analyzing a company. I would suggest reading this book: Security Analysis and this. Those two books will teach you exactly what you're trying to figure out now in terms of "learning to invest".

Keep learning, don't stop growing.

u/GuiMontague · 1 pointr/PersonalFinanceCanada

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Written by an investing titan for a lay audience. He also wrote the more advanced Securities Analysis, and was the mentor of Warren Buffett. I suggest the latest edition as the commentary by Jason Zweig does much to update the examples, and shows how timeless the advice really is.

u/Unaufhaltbarr · 1 pointr/stocks

The Intelligent Investor

It's what I've been reading. It's considered the Bible of stock market readings by some, and it's holy gospel for me so far as I've been getting my feet wet. Lots of stuff to learn here

u/yuppykaiA · 1 pointr/FinancialCareers

www.investopedia.com for looking up financial terms.

www.bloomberg.com for financial news.

Warren Buffet talk on youtube

Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters

Books-

The warren buffet way will help you analyse companies.

The intelligent investor the book on value investing.

Common stocks and uncommon profits the book on picking growth stocks.

The black swan useful insight into options trading.

Anything and everything by Michael Lewis, he writes so well, his books will give you insight into how the finance industry actually works and they're entertaining; Liars Poker chronicles how the Mortgage Backed Security was created and is a good start.

When you're done with all that, let me know and I'll send more your way! Studying for the CFA helps too as recommended by the other guy posting here but you by no means need a finance/business major.


u/rickscarf · 1 pointr/StLouis

I'd consider this book a must-read

u/No-Nrg · 1 pointr/stocks

I'd start by reading through Investopedia Stock Basics to get the general overview.

A few good books include:

u/balrogwarrior · 1 pointr/PersonalFinanceCanada

Do a tonne of reading. A lot of things are US based but the principles apply to Canada too. Read the investing for beginners info at about.com to get a grasp. Joshua Kennon is a pretty smart guy when it comes to investing and business but he really just follows the principles of Benjamin Graham (Warren Buffet's mentor). Security Anaylsis is very good as well as The Intelligent Investor.

u/linkai · 1 pointr/investing

Firstly, you are right to be paranoid. DO NOT enlist the services of a financial advisor. Their performance almost never justifies their fees in the long run. Also beware of high expense ratio mutual funds. Below are two good options. One requires some study (but perhaps less than you may fear). The second is very easy and hands-off.

Option 1: Sit in cash and learn about investing, then invest intelligently. *see details below

Option 2: If you don't want to take a bit of time to learn how to invest, open a brokerage account (Fidelity and Vanguard are both good). Put 80% of the money in a low expense-ratio S&P ETF (such as IVV or SPY) and 20% in a low expense-ratio short-term bond ETF (BSV). The S&P ETF will simply perform as the overall US economy does over the long term. The bond ETF acts as a sort of 'ballast' for the equities (S&P / stock market) portion of your investment. As opposed to long-term bond funds/ETFs, short-term bonds are less interest-rate sensitive. This will do better than most mutual funds long term. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOS4wAsBnvM

With either option, you should be contributing to an IRA to the maximum allowed amount every year. Whether you use the money yourself or give it away, you will pay less taxes.

*Resources for learning to invest wisely (the much better option!):

https://www.ruleoneinvesting.com/podcast/

https://www.amazon.com/Essays-Warren-Buffett-Lessons-Corporate/dp/1611637589/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1611637589&pd_rd_r=49H5XWEBE322MGN21T9A&pd_rd_w=4BiWA&pd_rd_wg=h8HSo&psc=1&refRID=49H5XWEBE322MGN21T9A

https://www.amazon.com/Dhandho-Investor-Low-Risk-Method-Returns/dp/047004389X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524885124&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dhandho+investor

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524885145&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor+by+benjamin+graham

u/acconrad · 1 pointr/investing

If you want to hold something for a long time you should look into investing the way Buffett did.

u/DanKillan · 0 pointsr/stocks

Hello, yes, beginner here too

I suggest buying this book like I just did, we can read it and discuss different chapters and figure this money making thing out together

The Intelligent Investor

u/honza17 · 0 pointsr/litecoin

nth :) btw, this is really worth reading book about the long term investing: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

The recent revision here, but you can find also translated versions in case English is not your native language:
https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

It's nearly all about stocks and obligations. But the crypto analogy is obvious. It really helped me to understand better the market and stay calm during the actual bear period.

u/rao-blackwell-ized · 0 pointsr/M1Finance

>do you have any suggestions of things to add?

VTI and/or something like VIG or DGRO, which capture dividend growth stocks - companies that have a history of increasing their dividend. I wouldn't let individual picks comprise more than 10% of my portfolio, but admittedly I'm an ardent index investor.

>I want to keep the dividend ratio over 7%

Why? You're just increasing your tax burden unnecessarily in doing so, especially with REITs, and you're missing out on mid- and small-caps, which have outperformed large-caps over time. I don't recommend chasing yield as income. Just sell shares when you want to.

>I prefer companies with growth potential and companies that survived the 2008 recession.

Look into VIG and long-term treasury bonds. This link shows how they fared better during the 2008 crash compared to the S&P 500. Long-term treasuries are usually inversely correlated to stocks.

>I feel like adding to many more would hurt my return as I have picked the "best" in the sectors I am involved with that support the dividend I would like to sustain.

How do you know you've picked the "best?" Evidence has shown time and time again that even most professional investors can't pick winners that beat a straight S&P 500 index fund over 10+ years, much less the average retail investor. I learned this the hard way firsthand.

You've said you're a beginner investor, which is even more of a reason to simply use index funds, or at the very least sector/factor ETF's as core holdings and then a small allocation for your individual picks if you want to keep things interesting. Or if you like the idea of picking winners, you can let Warren Buffett do it for you by simply investing in Berkshire Hathaway.

>I was considering a Chinese market ETF as the Chinese market is growing faster than the U.S. market currently. Opinions?

I don't know much about the Chinese market and it doesn't align with my investing strategy, so I can't really comment on that. You could utilize VIGI to capture international dividend growers.

I would suggest reading:

  • The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
  • Common Sense Investing by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard
  • Google for articles related to "asset allocation," "risk management," "diversification," and "volatility reduction" in relation to investing.
u/Living_like_a_ · 0 pointsr/politics

Are you asking a question, or making a statement? Would you like to define what you mean by "other stuff"?




If you want to know where I derived the ideas that I formed my comment from. It was mainly from reading these three books -




Security Analysis, 6th edition, by Graham & Dodd




The Intelligent Investor, by Graham




A People's History of the United States, by Zinn



u/aelendel · 0 pointsr/investing

My advice to you is to learn how to really invest. It can be very rewarding and fun.

Read this book, read some Buffet, learn the psychology of investors. Good luck!

u/DonaldTrumpsToilett · 0 pointsr/investing
u/gpforlife · -1 pointsr/Detroit

I feel like this statement should have a question mark at the end of it.

Fundamental analysis isn't some dark art. It's fucking arithmetic.

Read this book and this book It should take you less than a month to read both.

u/FoolsGhold · -2 pointsr/personalfinance

take your money out of the 401k and put it into an index mutual fund. This book will go into more detail about it. https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479406931&sr=8-1&keywords=investing
And pay off that debt. no point in keeping that around when you have the money to pay it off now.

u/sdguero · -5 pointsr/sandiego

In the meantime you can play on the stock market. If you work for a tech company, or any industry that has publically traded companies, you may already have the knowledge to make some good trades and get some decent returns.

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661

u/Donnie-Azoff · -9 pointsr/investing

You clearly don't have a solid understanding of capital markets if you think you can day trade successfully.

Read this book instead. http://www.amazon.com/The-Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing/dp/0060555661