Outsmarting the Smart Money : Understand How Markets Really Work and Win the Wealth Game
Author: Lawrence A. Cunningham
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0071386998
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade (15 April, 2002)
Sales Rank: 172,073
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Barron's Is Right: Top Book of 2002
I read Cunningham's book based on the review in Barron's rounding up the best investment books of 2002. They were right. The book is a eye-opening intro to the psychology of investing, important to investors and market observers/regulators. (Cunningham's other books have more of the basics for investors--also very good books.)
Rating: 5 out of 5
Great Book (Odd Title)
Awesome. Cunningham dissects the woes besetting corporate American using lucid, concrete examples, with boundless energy and enthusiasm, endorsed properly on the back cover by those who take behavioralism seriously, including Gary Belsky, who wrote the top-seller "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" (which is about general habits, not investment philosophy of which Cunningham writes) and Robert Hagstrom, prolific author (who writes about investment philosophy, and sometimes behavioralism). What an astonishing record Cunningham has developed as a writer and expert in invesetment theory and practice! A better title for this book would be Rational Investing in a Hair Brained Environment; the one chosen is unduly flashy for the seriousness of Cunningham's pursuits (he's a professor of law and business!).
Rating: 2 out of 5
Title promises, but book doesn't deliver.
Doesn't this book sound like a battle plan for investment success, maybe one filled with value-based accounting lessons? It's not.In fact, we are spared math, and we are not given practical counsel, either. That was what I looking for, as the title suggests. The title should be How Can The Smart Money Be So Dumb.
Instead, this is an interesting run-through of recent horror stories on Wall Street from the Internet bubble to IPO's to pro forma accounting and Enron. Behavioral finance is discussed here, but Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich is far superior.
Or read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein. Or John Neff On Investing instead.
Mr. Cunningham is one of the new wave of Buffett explainers. (Where were you people 15 years ago when there was money to be made buying Berkshire?) And why does someone so incisive, so downhome funny as Mr. Buffett need so much explanation?? (Try Cunningham's The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America or the Berkshire Hathaway annual report.)
Unfortunately, the author lets slip his idea of a five-year holding period for stocks. That may turn out to be good advice, but which stocks would he choose to hold? We have no idea. (Tech stocks, big winners 2 years ago, have crashed back down to their 1997 prices. And non-tech Walt Disney is well below its 1997 prices.)
I think Mr. Cunningham is an extremely brave and patient investor.
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