Best investment / trading book for xmas

[ratkin]

I will kick off

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation by David Dreman

Very good read .Dreman makes a persuasive case here that the financial experts and analysts as well as the average investor are terrible in predicting which way the stock market is going. If you want to beat the market, you need to do the opposite of everyone else, by investing in currently out-of-favor value stocks with low P/E ratios.

The section on suprises in the market is very good. One slip by growth stocks can be a disaster (ccp is a recent australian example of this)
Data shows that over time the low P/E stocks outperm the market darlings.

I can recommend this book to anyone , top read

[AMR]

I will definitely take a look at that ratkin, my opinion of contrarians is that they are all knife-catchers who get their fingers chopped off or those who jump out of trends early because prices are "too high" and end up holding dogs like TUA.

Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns by Thomas Bulkowski

Share trading is a minus sum probability game but many other TA books have vague phrases like "a double top tends to lead to a drop in prices". This book is backtested for several years and instead contains failure rates of chart patterns, probabilities on how far they will rise/fall, etc. It is very easy reading compared to other TA books, and is also a good reference.

At $100 odd NZD it's quite expensive but if I had known about double tops before I bought into FPH (which had just completed a double top right before I bought in) I would have saved far more. Knowledge is cheap!

[whiteheron]

It sounds like this just might be what my wife could get me for Christmas, she thinks that I have everything and doesnt know what to get me

I will check it out --- sounds like it may be worth a read

The best knowledge costs in one way or the other (expensive experience or cash)

[Mick100]

Best book I read this year was -

the winning Invesment habits of waren buffett and george soros

by; Mark tier



Got it from the local library - great book

[Hoop]

Look up Google books and type in the print box what book or interest you want, then click the search books button. If you're lucky it may be there in its entirety for you to read, save on file, or printout.

e.g The Essential Buffett: Timeless Principles for the New Economy by Robert G 2001 Only pages 122-126 missing (not yet digitised).

Type in Buffett and click search books button ...what a treat..enough there to read for years

Good hunting
Hoop

[Hoop]

I will definitely take a look at that ratkin, my opinion of contrarians is that they are all knife-catchers who get their fingers chopped off or those who jump out of trends early because prices are "too high" and end up holding dogs like TUA.

Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns by Thomas Bulkowski

Share trading is a minus sum probability game but many other TA books have vague phrases like "a double top tends to lead to a drop in prices". This book is backtested for several years and instead contains failure rates of chart patterns, probabilities on how far they will rise/fall, etc. It is very easy reading compared to other TA books, and is also a good reference.

At $100 odd NZD it's quite expensive but if I had known about double tops before I bought into FPH (which had just completed a double top right before I bought in) I would have saved far more. Knowledge is cheap!

AMR click here for Trading Classic Chart Patterns By Thomas N. Bulkowski Thomas Bulkowski follow up book... yep off Google Books . It says limited preview but it seems to be all there, (edit...no it not pages 172-351 missing) takes a few seconds longer to download the pages than normal( using broadband), probably due to the graphics.

[Deev8]

Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation by David Dreman

I'll second that, the book is an excellent read. Although it's worth noting that Dreman's new book "Contrarian Investment Strategies: The New Psychological Breakthrough" has very recently been published.

[patsy]

The Intelligent Asset Allocator by William Bernstein

[Snoopy]

...by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, ISBN 0-465-04357-7, published 2004. Don't ask me where you can buy it, because I had to get my copy from Amazon.

This book is of interest because it brings into finance ideas from other disciplines, in particular the study of turbulence. What does the study of wave profiles gathered by sea ships and the capacity of dams to serve as irrigation feeds for crop growing have to do with the behaviour of markets? In a mathematical sense - quite a lot. And there are practical spin offs which provide insights for investors.

There are lessons to be learned from this book. But they are more along the lines of 'what not to do', rather than a dissertation on some tidy method for 'doing things right'. Partly this is because senior author's Mandelbrot's life work in the term he has coined 'fractal geometery' is still a work in progress. Mandelbrot's ideas are not entirely mainstream. In part I believe this book is written to pique the interest of future generations into carrying on the 'fractal geometery' research line. In Amazon reader reviews, this book is criticised for not providing clear answers. I think this is an unfair criticisim. There is more than enough material there to make you think. And there is no point in tying a whole lot of strands together if they don't naturally 'knot' together. I score this book 8/10.

SNOOPY

[FarmerGeorge]

Being a farmer means having plenty of spare time to read. Some of my favourites of the past twelve months which are relevant to this forum are:

Fooled by Randomness
(which contrasts nicely with):

Freakonomics
The Undercover Economist

plus Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' and 'The Tipping Point'. These two are a bit overdone in the media but one which is a little older and less populist (but no less accessible) is 'Critical Mass: How one thing leads to another'.

However I agree 100% with KW above, Jason Zweig's commentary in The Intelligent Investor seems a little dated with so may references to the dot-com meltdown but is definitely my number one investing book: I even keep a copy in the tractor to flip through a chapter when I'm taking a break.