Monday, September 8, 2014

Book Reviews From Credit Bubble Stocks

5/5 - These Are "Must Read"

4/5
3/5
2/5
1/5
We do grade books on a bit of a curve:

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

thx.

Just picked up Country Driving and Shipping Man off amazon.

Hopefully they are as good as yyou say.

Anonymous said...

Re: your review of The Outsiders, I think you might have been too harsh. Meant to mention this when you reviewed it but figured I missed the window, so will comment here. I took the book as much less ambitious than you did and therefore was not looking for scientific rigor. Is it academically robust? No. Is there survivorship bias? Of course! Does it give short shrift to the importance of a good underlying business? Yes. (John Malone recognized that the cable biz was incredible. Once that incredibly valuable insight was in place, it made it straightforward to be a “good capital allocator”. So cause and effect might be confused here). And yes, one can certainly, and many probably will, learn the wrong lesson – just lever up and buy everything in sight and all will be well!
But I don’t think you would disagree with this: capital allocation matters and a surprisingly large number of CEO’s don’t have a clue about capital allocation.

Anonymous said...

P.S. I've enjoyed your book reviews, including the one on the outsiders.

James said...

Re: your review of The Outsiders, I think you might have been too harsh. Meant to mention this when you reviewed it but figured I missed the window, so will comment here. I took the book as much less ambitious than you did and therefore was not looking for scientific rigor.

When people criticize The Outsiders, I think they're criticizing more than just the book. They're also commenting on various psychological mistakes that investors make: survivorship bias, hindsight bias, hero worship, etc. Since The Outsiders receives fulsome praise from the kind of people who make those mistakes, it becomes a stand-in for them.

But the book itself is nothing special. In addition to its methodological flaws, it lacks any useful detail: it's essentially eight magazine profiles of successful CEOs, and the profiles offer nothing that readers can't find elsewhere.

Anonymous said...

Boobies.

CP said...

Magazine profiles is the perfect description.