Some Good News on the Stock Market

The world’s greatest investor Warren Buffett read this book when he was 19 years old, and he still calls this “by far the best book about investing ever written.” The Intelligent Investor covers timeless ideas of how the market behaves, how investment is different from speculation, and how to identify profitable investments.

Learn whether you’re a defensive or an aggressive investor, why most trading strategies don’t work, and how to maintain control of your psychology in any type of market condition.

To the outsider, the world of investing can seem daunting to enter—if not outright impossible. But according to investment professional Howard Marks, anyone can learn the basics needed to invest successfully.

In his 2011 book The Most Important Thing, Marks outlines the key tenets of his approach to investing. He argues that the best approach for investors is value investing, which involves determining securities’ intrinsic value and purchasing below it. To practice it successfully, you must learn the nature of market cycles to find opportunities for purchasing mispriced securities, while also learning how to mitigate the risk entailed by investing.

In this guide, we’ll outline the fundamentals of value investing, discuss market cycles and how they’re useful to the value investor, and analyze the common mistakes that often leave investors exposed to unnecessary risk. Throughout the guide, we’ll also examine recommendations from other investors that supplement—and occasionally challenge—Marks’s investing wisdom.

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.

To the outsider, the world of investing can seem daunting to enter—if not outright impossible. But according to investment professional Howard Marks, anyone can learn the basics needed to invest successfully.

In his 2011 book The Most Important Thing, Marks outlines the key tenets of his approach to investing. He argues that the best approach for investors is value investing, which involves determining securities’ intrinsic value and purchasing below it. To practice it successfully, you must learn the nature of market cycles to find opportunities for purchasing mispriced securities, while also learning how to mitigate the risk entailed by investing.

In this guide, we’ll outline the fundamentals of value investing, discuss market cycles and how they’re useful to the value investor, and analyze the common mistakes that often leave investors exposed to unnecessary risk. Throughout the guide, we’ll also examine recommendations from other investors that supplement—and occasionally challenge—Marks’s investing wisdom.

To the uninitiated, investing can seem daunting and inaccessible. But according to investment professional Robert G. Hagstrom, it doesn’t have to be. Hagstrom argues that novice investors should emulate the greatest investor in history—Warren Buffett—so that they too can earn above-market returns.

In his 2013 book The Warren Buffett Way, Hagstrom outlines and explains Buffett’s approach to stock market investing. Hagstrom argues that, rather than deferring to financial analysts, investors should follow suit with Buffett and assess companies along four dimensions—their financial prospects, their market value, their business model, and their management—to identify promising companies to invest in.

In this guide, we’ll examine how Buffett quantitatively and qualitatively evaluates companies to decide whether to invest, as well as his recommendations for managing your portfolio and avoiding psychological mistakes. We’ll also consider alternative approaches to investing and discuss updates to Hagstrom’s arguments since publication.

Are you struggling to achieve consistent success as a financial trader? Trading consultant Mark Douglas says you don’t need more knowledge or better advice to improve. He claims one factor distinguishes successful traders: a winning mindset. In Trading in the Zone, Douglas explains that when trading, we often mistakenly embody a fear-based mindset instead and avoid risk. Therefore, no matter how much time we spend studying the market, we’ll fail to establish a pattern of winning. To achieve consistent success, we need to train ourselves to think differently and embody the winning mindset, and Douglas tells us how.

In this guide, we’ll present the mental barriers that Douglas says we need to overcome and the core beliefs we need to internalize to trade successfully. We’ll also examine research in psychology, biology, and finance that explores these concepts. Along the way, you’ll learn practical steps to reduce interference from negative thoughts so you can start accumulating wins (and profits).