Portfolio Playbooks: How the Greats Invest Their Money

In The Simple Path to Wealth, blogger and financial expert JL Collins offers a simple road map to achieving financial independence and a secure retirement: Spend less than you make, avoid debt, save “F-You Money,” and invest in stock index funds. He demystifies stocks and bonds, as well as a plethora of investment plan options. In addition to explaining basic concepts such as asset allocation, Collins answers key questions such as how to live on your investments and how to avoid major tax hits.

Whether you’re in the wealth accumulation stage of life where you’re growing your investments, or in the wealth preservation stage where you’re living on them, Collins tells you how to use your money to achieve freedom and a more fulfilling life.

Does thinking about your personal finances make your palms start to sweat? If so, you’re not alone. The sheer amount of information out there about managing your finances is overwhelming, especially for people in their 20s or 30s who are just starting their financial journeys. Ramit Sethi is a self-taught expert in personal finance whose goal is to help you cut through the noise of conflicting and overly technical financial advice, get past your own hang-ups around money, and take small steps toward a “rich life”—whatever that looks like for you.

In this summary, you’ll learn how to use credit cards wisely, choose the right bank accounts and investment accounts, plan out your spending, and ultimately create a financial system that grows your money automatically.

Investing experts and laypeople alike often lament the unpredictability of the securities market—financial markets on which investments like stocks and bonds are sold. However, according to one of the world’s leading investors, Howard Marks, this belief in the market’s unpredictability is unfounded. In Mastering the Market Cycle, he argues that the securities market fluctuates predictably based on recurring business cycles and patterns in investor psychology.

In this guide, we’ll begin by discussing the foundational cycles—the economic cycle, the profit cycle, and the credit cycle—that shape the investing landscape and impact the securities market. Then, we’ll turn to the psychological cycles that arise from these business cycles, examining how investors swing between greed and fear and between risk tolerance and risk aversion. Finally, we’ll discuss how these cycles influence the overall securities market cycle and how understanding the securities market is crucial to earning above-market returns.

Have you always wanted to invest in the stock market but felt too uninformed or inexperienced to do so? In One Up on Wall Street, legendary investor Peter Lynch argues that you not only have all the tools you need to become a savvy investor but that you actually have a better chance of investing successfully than professionals and firms: You can act independently and based on your own good information.

Lynch describes a no-nonsense approach to the stock market that involves examining your daily life for investment opportunities, doing your research, and diligently monitoring your portfolio over time. Rather than following the complex predictions of so-called professionals or leaping on the latest and greatest overpriced stock, he advises you to keep your own counsel, be self-reliant, and see yourself as your greatest resource.

Alongside Lynch’s investing advice, we’ll present the varied and sometimes opposing recommendations of other investors and experts, 21st-century updates to some of his ideas, and clarifications on certain concepts.

In The Simple Path to Wealth, blogger and financial expert JL Collins offers a simple road map to achieving financial independence and a secure retirement: Spend less than you make, avoid debt, save “F-You Money,” and invest in stock index funds. He demystifies stocks and bonds, as well as a plethora of investment plan options. In addition to explaining basic concepts such as asset allocation, Collins answers key questions such as how to live on your investments and how to avoid major tax hits.

Whether you’re in the wealth accumulation stage of life where you’re growing your investments, or in the wealth preservation stage where you’re living on them, Collins tells you how to use your money to achieve freedom and a more fulfilling life.

If you’re asked who the greatest CEO of the last century was, one name might naturally come to mind: Jack Welch. Sure, he achieved great financial return and is trumpeted by the press. But is Jack Welch really the greatest CEO of the century? According to the author of The Outsiders, no—not even close. There are CEOs who performed better during worse economic periods.

Studying companies broadly, the author ended with eight CEOs and companies with standout performance during the 20th century. Looking deeper into their management practices, he found virtually identical patterns to their management style and capital allocation decisions. These strategies were unorthodox but directly caused their outsized results. These CEOs and their management practices are the subject of The Outsiders.

With various companies vying to manage investors’ money, investing can feel overwhelming. John Bogle, however, argues that the winning strategy for novice investors is simple: Invest in traditional index funds and hold them indefinitely.

In his 2017 book, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, Bogle outlines the reasons why investors typically make more money with index funds than the primary alternative—actively managed mutual funds. Because the costs of mutual funds vastly outstrip those of index funds, Bogle argues that mutual funds deliver reduced returns, and those relative losses compound over time.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Bogle’s arguments about the superiority of index funds over mutual funds, in addition to his proposed allocation of stocks to bonds in your portfolio. We’ll also dig deeper into the data that underlie Bogle’s arguments and examine how the book’s predictions have panned out since its publication.

A massive bestseller now in its 13th edition, Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street provides a comprehensive and entertaining introduction to the world of finance. Malkiel leverages his experience as an academic economist and former Wall Street portfolio manager to explain for the lay reader the intricacies of security analysis, asset valuation, and investment theory. He also offers a wealth of practical investment principles that will be useful for novice and seasoned investors alike.