Gary Mishuris
March 15, 2019
Gary Mishuris is the Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Silver Ring Value Partners, an investment firm with a concentrated long-term intrinsic value strategy. Prior to founding the firm in 2016, Mr. Mishuris was a Managing Director at Manulife Asset Management since 2011, where he was the Lead Portfolio Manager of the US Focused Value strategy.

Best Investing Books That Will Make You a Good Investor

I am frequently asked: what are the best books on investing? How do I develop my investment philosophy and process? How do I become a good investor? I have mentored many aspiring investors, and I also teach the Value Investing Seminar at the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business. The investing books that I describe below have helped many aspiring investors make their journey from a beginner to an investing expert:

Best Investing Books That Will Make You a Good Investor

Reading even the best investing books is not enough. You need to have a process for using what you learn to develop your own investment philosophy and investment process . As you read each of these investing books, you should also be doing three things:

 1.   Understand – You should be able to understand the key investing ideas in each book, not just quote them. Do you understand why the master investor used the approach that he or she did? What was the historical context or investing environment that they were in? How are the different parts of the investment process related to each other?

2.   Apply – Investing is not a theoretical endeavor. The most successful investors in the world have not been professors merely armed with theories, but rather practitioners who understood theory and were able to successfully apply it in practice. If you don’t practice applying the knowledge that you glean as you read these investing books, you might be left with a deceptive feeling of mastery of the material where none exists.

3.   Customize – You are not Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham or Phil Fisher. Your strengths and weaknesses are different. Your investment operation and constraints might be different. So don’t run around trying to be the next Warren Buffett. Instead, become the strongest investor that you are capable of becoming by customizing what you learn. Use the insights in these books to build your own investment process, don’t just blindly copy theirs.

The list of the best investing books presented below is in the order in which you should read them. You will increase your odds of becoming a good investor if you study each book before moving on to the next one. Don’t rush – this is not a list of easy investing books that you can master in a few weeks or even a few months. Instead, this is a path that will take most of you years to master. I have read the first book on the list, Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis , four times in my almost two decades of professional investing. Each time I have learned something new, informed by the additional investing experience that I have had since the prior reading.

As you read each of these investing books, keep asking yourself these questions:

  • What about this approach appeals to you and what does not?

  • How much of the approach was influenced by the investor's personality and how much by the external environment during which they were investing?

  • How successful would this approach be in the current investment environment?

 

 

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