
The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World's Greatest Investors You've Never Heard Of and What You Can Learn From Them
Posted by jack_miller | Published 10 months ago

With 49 ratings
By: Matthew Schifrin
Purchased At: $29.95
The Warren Buffetts Next Door profiles previously unknown investors, with legendary performance records, who are proving every day that you don't need to work for a hedge fund or have an Ivy League diploma to consistently beat the best performing Wall Street professionals.
These amazing individuals come from all walks of life, from a globe drifting college dropout and a retired disc jockey to a computer room geek and a truck driver. Their methods vary from technical trading and global macro-economic analysis to deep value investing. The glue that holds them together is their passion for investing and their ability to efficiently harness the Internet for critical investment ideas, research, and trading skills.
- The author digs deep to find the best of the best, even finding those who are making money during these turbulent times
- Contains case studies that will explain to you how these great individual investors find and profit from stocks and options.
- Shows you how to rely on your own instincts and knowledge when making important investment decisions
In an era when the best professional advice has cracked many investor nest eggs and Madoff-style frauds have shattered investor trusts, the self-empowered investors found in The Warren Buffetts Next Door offer an inspiring and educational tale.
They all have exit criteria - that point at which they sell their stocks for a reason they have determined makes sense.
They have all made mistakes, loosing a significant portion of their investment in some stock.
They all spread their investments among several stocks so a bad loss doesn't wipe them out.
I like the approach taken with this book, looking at their biographies, methods, web sites they use, biggest hit and biggest wipeout.
For someone interested in becoming an investor this is a useful and encouraging book.
In addition to providing biographical material on the traders featured in the book, Schifrin details their rules of investing. I found these tenets to be especially helpful and surprisingly varied. The strategy tips and the quotes from each of the people interviewed are ones I can use.
A great book that was fun to read and taught me a lot!
Some of the investment returns seemed unrealistic because the amount of money invested in a virtual portfolio was in the millions of dollars. However, the author did say he did not look at the one investors brokerage statement to verify actual rates of return leading one to believe he was able to verify real the rates of return for the other investors profiled.
If you are looking for a book that teaches you how to invest, this book will not get the job done. On the back cover, one of the endorsements says "... their unique styles may not be replicable..." and I have to agree. Some of the participants would not fully disclose exactly how they made their investment decisions.
The take away from this book is anyone can be a successful investor if they are willing to first educate themselves and then put in the time necessary for research to generate above average returns. Overall this is a good book and it may give you some ideas how to improve your own investment returns as some investors reveal screening criteria and the websites they use to perform their due diligence. If nothing else, this book will inspire you to work at improving your own investment returns. And since Mr. Buffett's own investment strategy is not replicable, isn't that why we read books with his name in the title?