Book Review: The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

About:
The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing by Benjamin Graham is a non-fiction book, written first in 1949, but has been updated with commentary ever since. This book is on any financial “must read” list, so I figured it’s a good one to start with.

• 640 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060555661

My rat­ing for Blood Stripe — 5
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Thoughts:
I have always been interested in investing and letting my money grow, but it took me a long time to figure out how and understand basic concepts. I lost some money day trading before I realized that it is gambling, not investing and in some penny stocks just to learn how to trade. Recently I decided that I need to start teaching my kids (11 and 8 at the time of this post) about investing and frugality, hopefully to give them a leg up when they reach adulthood.

I started doing research and set up two mock portfolios for them on Google finance, where they each got $1,000 dollars to spend and watch it grow (or fall). We check the portfolios every month where they can make changes and invest another $100.

After reading some online forms, I picked up The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing by Benjamin Graham, an insightful and powerful book despite, or maybe because, its age. Mr. Graham values discipline and focusing on long-term investments, instead of gambling on quick turnaround.

This book is certainly an eye opener when it comes to the financial markets, and how one can profit by investing yourself, not being a professional. The book covers fluctuations of the market, so the investor can understand what is happening and keep emotions or crowd mentality out of the picture. The author also touches on speculation (not recommended), types of investing (defensive, enterprising), market fluctuations, funds, municipal bonds and much, much more.

One of the best advices I got from this book is to put most of your money in index funds (lazy investing) and keep a small percentage of your money (5% or so, an amount you can afford to lose) to buy individual stocks and trade, just so you can feel that you are “doing something” while the majority of your money is earning interest in relative safety.

Buy The Intelligent Investor from Amazon.com*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got this book from the local library.
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account