A wealth of information is available that can extend and add to your knowledge of the subject we’ve covered in these pages.
What follows is a selection of books, Web sites, and other sources I think you’ll find most useful.
On my Web site you’ll find a number of articles and other resources on general investment topics. From time to time (on no fixed schedule) I’ll add new posts on my Money Markets & Mischief blog. You can sign up for either all posts or money and investment topics only.
Plus a complimentary eBook: How to Make More Money by Sitting on Your Butt.
That’s just one of the many contrarian conclusions I’ve usually come to from a lifetime in the markets. Usually the hard way: by losing money or missing out on a slam dunk opportunity.
Check it out here: marktier.com/sitting.
And also, two questionnaires that can help improve your investment returns:
What’s Your Investment Personality?
The simplest way to become a better investor—and make more money more easily—is to discover, focus on, and act from the investment style that suits you best.
In my book The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros I identify three major “investor archetypes”:
The Analyst, personified by Warren Buffett.
The Trader, epitomized by George Soros, who acts decisively, often on incomplete information, trusting his gut feel, supremely confident that he can always beat a hasty retreat.
The Actuary deals in numbers and probabilities. Like an insurance company he is focused on the overall outcome, totally unconcerned with any single event. The actuarial investment strategy is, perhaps, best characterized by the legendary investor Benjamin Graham. It’s also the basis of most successful commodity trading systems.
Each of us has a natural affinity with one of the three archetypes.
What’s yours? Knowing the answer is essential if you want to develop an investment style that you know is going to work for you.
Find out what kind of investor you are by completing my “Investor Personality Profile.”
Discover Your Investment IQ
A second questionnaire will give you a detailed report on your investment habits and strategies.
You will discover how you, as an investor, compare to Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, and George Soros.
Plus you’ll also receive a detailed report highlighting your investment weaknesses—and strengths.
And exactly what steps you need to take to make more money more easily.
You’ll find it at marktier.com/iq.
Let’s now turn to other topics, beginning with general investment resources, before turning to resources specific to the various topics we’ve been discussing here.
Investment Resources (General)
Unsurprisingly, I highly recommend my own The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffett & George Soros.
This book is not about investing per se, but about the mental habits Warren Buffett, George Soros, and other successful investors including Carl Icahn, Sir John Templeton, Benjamin Graham, and Bernard Baruch have all practiced religiously.
Whatever your investment style, you’ll improve your investment returns by adopting the mental habits of the world’s greatest investors.
Essential reading for any investor taking a long-term view is Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, plus Warren Buffett’s “Letters to Shareholders.”
Believing you have to be able to predict the market to be a successful investor is one of what I call the Seven Deadly Investment Sins.*
The antidote is The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions, by William A. Sherden.
He shows that only one class of forecasters beats the naïve forecast (the weather / the market / the dollar / etc., will be / do the same today as it did yesterday) with any regularity: weather forecasters. But only for forecasts for up to four days in the future. And even then, by only a small margin.
So next time you’re tempted to listen to some guru’s market prediction, remember that you can beat any guru—on average—by simply “predicting” that the market will do tomorrow what it did today.
Finally, Finding the Next Starbucks, by Michael Moe, takes a “top-down” approach to searching for the next high-growth company. An excellent companion to the “bottom-up” perspective you’ve been reading here.
Old School Value
While many financial indicators are readily available on Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, oldschoolvalue.com goes dozens of steps farther by crunching those numbers for you on any US-listed company, in more ways than you’ve ever thought of before.
OSV is an invaluable aid to making informed buy or sell decisions, even when (or especially when) number crunching is not your forte.
Try it out for yourself: oldschoolvalue.com.
Management and Company Culture
Both Onward, by Howard Schultz, and Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, by Louis Gerstner, demonstrate the importance of restoring (Starbucks) or reinventing (IBM) a company’s culture to ensure its future profitability.
John Mackey outlines a primary reason behind Whole Foods’ success in Conscious Capitalism—the creation of a unique company culture.
Good to Great and Built to Last, both by Jim Collins, are essential guides to appreciate the components that go into creating a great and lasting business.
In Friend and Foe, Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer apply the results of scientific research to creating the atmosphere of trust and managing the tension between cooperation and competition.
Building a successful brand is one of the more powerful marketing tools available to any business. Brand Royalty, by Matt Haig, is a fascinating and highly useful survey of the world’s top one hundred brands—and what made them successful.
Starting Your Own Business
Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant makes the fundamental differences between a real business and a one-man band crystal clear.
One essential difference between the two is system. And Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth, and its companion, E-Myth Workbook, are essential guides to developing a business system.*
After writing that when planning a business you should “begin at the end rather than the beginning” (here), I was pleased to have my view powerfully reinforced when I came across Start at the End, by David Lavinsky. He’s an entrepreneur who, today, advises business owners on how they can improve their results by focusing on their ultimate goals and working backward to the establishment and running of a business, rather than the other way around.
The $100 Startup, by Chris Guillebeau, is based on hundreds of interviews with people from all around the world who have retired from the corporate rat race and created a business so they can do their own thing—and get paid for it.
While Guillebeau’s focus is on starting a small business rather than the next Starbucks, the key takeaway is how easy it really is to start a profitable business on a shoestring. Whatever your ultimate aim.
Zero to One, from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, is based on a course about start-ups he gave at Stanford University in 2012. His focus is on building a business that will offer something new, and potentially revolutionary.
While not a how-to book, Zero to One offers a set of guidelines based on Thiel’s extensive experience in the high-tech and venture capital fields.
Finally, here are three information sources I find particularly helpful. Each offers a regular e-mail news update:
Fast Casual, fastcasual.com/.
Nation’s Restaurant News: nrn.com/.
And CBInsights, which covers a wide range of industries, including high-tech: cbinsights.com.
Franchising
An enormous amount of information and advice on franchising is freely available thanks to the Internet.
A good place to start is the Franchise Business Review, www.franchisebusinessreview.com, and its article “5 Reliable Resources for Your Franchise Research”: http://www.fbr50.com/5-reliable-resources-franchise-research/.
Another source: the International Franchise Association (www.franchise.org), which, despite its name, is primarily US oriented.
Similar organizations in other countries can help you with the local franchising rules, regulations—and opportunities. Country-specific Google searches on franchising will bring up organizations similar to the International Franchise Association, and other resources that will help you get started.
Venture Capital / Angel Investing
Here are three links that offer crucial input for anyone thinking of starting a business. Big or small.
In this TED Talk, Idealab founder Bill Gross discusses the single biggest reason why start-ups succeed: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed?language=en.
Negative feedback is often more useful than praise. Better to get it before you start. “5 Signs Your Startup Is Screwed” highlights five important factors you must avoid if you want to succeed: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3017681/it-careers/5-signs-your-startup-is-screwed.html.
Indian VC Mahesh Murthy’s sixteen-point checklist helps him decide whether to invest in a start-up. Highly useful: https://www.quora.com/Seedfund-What-does-Mahesh-Murthy-look-for-in-a-company-before-investing-in-it-at-seed-level.
Finding venture capital. In the last twenty-five years, tens if not hundreds of thousands of venture capital funds have come into existence all over the world.
So much money is chasing so many business ideas this is probably the best time in history to be an entrepreneur.
If you’re looking for venture capital, here are some directories and other sources of information:
http://www.boogar.com/resources/venturecapital/index.htm
https://www.angelinvestmentnetwork.us/
“Top 10 Angel Investor Groups,” according to Entrepreneur magazine: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220149.
Equity crowdfunding is another source of capital:
http://www.icapitalnetwork.com/
http://www.moneycrashers.com/equity-crowdfunding-sites-investors-entrepreneurs/
https://www.techcoastangels.com/
http://www.investorscircle.net/
http://www.northcoastangelfund.com/
Crowdfunding is another source of risk capital:
http://crowdfundchampion.com/directory/
http://crowdexpert.com/investment-crowdfunding-platform-directory/
UK Company Credit Checks
If you want to run a credit check on a company in the United Kingdom, as we did in chapter 12 on Bettys, Henry Newrick is ready to help. You can contact him at henry@teamgroupuk.com.