Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth from the World's Best Money Managers

Customer Reviews

An interesting side note: The manager of the Brandywine fund was one of the professionals interviewed because his long-term record was exceptional prior to the publishing of the book. If you check the performance of the Brandywine fund recently and it has only been an average performer trailing the S&P 500 substantially over the last year. Maybe there is something to this idea of market efficiency.

One of the active managers with an exceptional record, Laura Sloate, mentioned a couple of stocks during the interview which she felt were bargains and would rise. One was Marvel Entertainment. Ms. Sloate didn't feel it could go much lower than its price then of around $10 a share. Last time I looked Marvel was trading at less than $1 per share. Maybe she did just happen to get lucky in the past. But perhaps she has a good sell discipline which allowed her to get out of the stock before the big fall.

One of the academic interview!ees, Rex Sinquefield, made a interesting quip. He called stock market newsletters "investment pornography," due to their dubious worth. I must say that I have to agree with him. Ninety percent of investment newsletters aren't worth the paper they're printed on. All in all, I came away reinforced in my belief that individual investors should have the majority of their funds going into index funds, preferably on a dollar cost averaging basis. If you feel compelled to "play" the market, do it with money you can afford to lose and keep track of your returns, or lack thereof. This way you'll discover the futility in trading your way to riches and not suffer as much in the process.

In contrast, Tanous knows how to ask questions that are of interest to professional and serious amateur investors, and he knows how to stay on topic. He does ask every interviewee about the efficient market hypothesis, but that's a theme of his book and can be excused. What you get from Tanous is an interviewer who knows how to ask really penetrating, really revealing questions of the world's best money managers, and the humility to realize that his readers don't want to know what he, Tanous, thinks, but what his interviewees think! What's more, he managed to get interviews with at least two money managers--Bruce Sherman of Private Capital Management and Scott Sterling Johnston of Sterling Johnston Asset Management--that have excellent track records but who speak very, very rarely to the press. There is real value to Tanous's book, and I'm a better investor for having read it. Serious investors should still read Train's books for their revealing interviews with Buffett, Templeton, Lynch and others, but in Tanous's book, you have all the strengths of the Train books without any of the that author's obvious, glaring shortcomings as a writer and interviewer.

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