The Guru Investor: How to Beat the Market Using History's Best Investment Strategies

by John P. Reese, Jack M. Forehand

Today's investor is faced with a myriad of investment options and strategies. Whether you are seeking someone to manage your money or are a self-directed investor deciding to tackle the market on your own, the options can be overwhelming.

In an easy-to-read and simple format, this book will dissect the strategies of some of Wall Street's most successful investment gurus and teach readers how to weed through the all of the choices to find a strategy that works for them. The model portfolio system that author John Reese developed turns each strategy into an actionable system, addressing many of the common mistakes that doom individual investors to market underperformance. This book will focus on the principles behind the author's multi-guru approach, showing how investors can combine the proven strategies of these legendary "gurus" into a disciplined investing system that has significantly outperformed the market.

Gurus covered in the book Benjamin Graham; John Neff; David Dreman; Warren Buffett; Peter Lynch; Ken Fisher; Martin Zweig; James O'Shaughnessy; Joel Greenblatt; and Joseph Piotroski.

Genres: Finance

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 26, 2009

Reviews

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for investors who wants to follow investments technics based in fundamentals. Really good summary of great investors.

[Rick Zhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is truly a great book if you are someone that is not only just into stocks, but someone that looks for ways to invest smartly. This book provides people with the techniques and ways to invest smartly. I do recommend that you grab a memo pad while reading this because you will need to jot some notes down.

[Wee Lip · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basic and dry. Personally, a combo of Buffett-Lynch investment style would be most potent, I think.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

the wild Amazone

surprisingly anemic
Goes over the strategies of guru investors and how they can be reduced to rules. But the book is full of padding. If you're a beginning investor something like The Little Book That Beats the Market is probably better, and if you're more experienced, What Works on Wall Street is probably better.

vildegrul

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Mostly self promotion

The author does cover the background and general investing techniques of investment legends but it felt as though the author wrote the book really as an endorsement and promotion.

The author owns a website where you have to pay to use the the screens and techniques outlined, they also are a registered investment advisor firm (ie they want you to invest your money with them), and they even have their own ETF that they started (an ETF is like a mutual funds but traded like a stock).

So, if you want background info on investment legends and some (definitely not all) of their screening criteria then the book is a decent read.

Many times in the book it'll say: this is one way this guru chose investments, if you want more info go to my website...which leads to the aforementioned.

I also found it interesting that the author discusses in the introduction that professional investors almost always underperform the market yet the authors company has paid investment website, their own ETF fund, sub-advises to a mutual fund, and has financial advisors sell their managed accounts.

Although performance is admittedly short on their ETF, as of end of 2015 as well as the date I write this 1/28/2016 the ETF has underperformed on every timeframe there is including since inception, YTD, and 1 year. As someone that says not to use professionally managed money it seems ironic that they have their hand in making money from investors in so many different areas.

all

[Maaz Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simple book, compiling the investment techniques of many great investors. The book is more quantitative in technique rather than qualitative but it does well to explain how one construct their own portfolio using the strategies of other famous money managers, based on their goals and investment styles.

Was refreshing compared to other books which try to either shove down a single investment methodology (such as growth, value, momentum, day-trading, etc.) as the only correct strategy, with all else being irrelevant or other books which claim markets are stupid and cannot be deciphered and one should dump their money into index funds or avoid the market in general.

A very good read, however, not exactly for beginners as it does take some concepts as assumed knowledge and isn't exactly "step-by-step".

[Ryan Madden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this one. It's pretty useful for quickly going through several stock picking systems all at once. There's a chapter on 10 different investors who have a system that can be quantified and proven results that are positive. A lot of the names like Ben Graham and Buffett and Lynch are in there, but also a few I was less familiar with. Having read a lot of books on the subject already, this one was nice to go through a bunch of systems in two days or whatever. The chapters on each system are not fully spelled out, so I don't think reading the Graham chapter is a substitute for reading Graham, but for what it is it's a handy toolbox kind of book.

[Ravali]

Awesome. But you need a pen, a piece of paper and few 10Q/Ks.