Pitch the Perfect Investment combines investment analysis with persuasion and sales to teach you the "soft skill" so crucial to success in the financial markets. Written by the leading authorities in investment pitching, this book shows you how to develop and exploit the essential, career-advancing skill of pitching value-creating ideas to win over clients and investors. You'll gain world-class insight into search strategy, data collection and research, securities analysis, and risk assessment and management to help you uncover the perfect opportunity; you'll then strengthen your critical thinking skills and draw on psychology, argumentation, and informal logic to craft the perfect pitch to showcase your perfect idea. The ability to effectively pitch an investment is essential to securing a job on Wall Street, where it immediately becomes a fundamental part of day-to-day business. This book gives you in-depth training along with access to complete online ancillaries and case studies so you can master the little skill that makes a big difference.

It doesn't matter how great your investment ideas are if you can't convince anyone to actually invest. Ideas must come to fruition to be truly great, and this book gives you the tools and understanding you need to get it done.

• Persuade potential investors, clients, executives, and employers
• Source, analyze, value, and pitch your ideas for stocks and acquisitions
• Get hired, make money, expand your company, and win business
• Craft the perfect investment into the perfect pitch

Money managers, analysts, bankers, executives, salespeople, students, and individual investors alike stand to gain massively by employing the techniques discussed here. If you're serious about success and ready to start moving up, Pitch the Perfect Investment shows you how to make it happen.

Howard Marks's The Most Important Thing distilled the investing insight of his celebrated client memos into a single volume and, for the first time, made his time-tested philosophy available to general readers. In this edition, Marks's wisdom is joined by the comments, insights, and counterpoints of four renowned investors and investment educators: Christopher C. Davis (Davis Funds), Joel Greenblatt (Gotham Capital), Paul Johnson (Nicusa Capital), and Seth A. Klarman (Baupost Group).

These experts lend insight into such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Marks also adds his own annotations, expanding on his book's original themes and issues. A new chapter addresses the importance of reasonable expectations, and a foreword by Bruce C. Greenwald, called "a guru to Wall Street's gurus" by the New York Times, speaks on value investing, productivity, and the economics of information.

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Howard Marks, the chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, is renowned for his insightful assessments of market opportunity and risk. After four decades spent ascending to the top of the investment management profession, he is today sought out by the world's leading value investors, and his client memos brim with insightful commentary and a time-tested, fundamental philosophy. Now for the first time, all readers can benefit from Marks's wisdom, concentrated into a single volume that speaks to both the amateur and seasoned investor.

Informed by a lifetime of experience and study, The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways.

Marks expounds on such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Frankly and honestly assessing his own decisions--and occasional missteps--he provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be "contrarian," Marks wisely judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of Marks's subjects proves to be the most important thing.

"This is that rarity, a useful book."--Warren Buffett

The Possibilities Are Staggering:

Had you invested $10,000 in Cisco Systems back in early 1990, your investment would now be worth $3,650,000

Similarly, a $10,000 investment made in Microsoft in 1986 would be valued at more than $4,721,000 today

$10,000 invested in Yahoo! in 1996 would today be worth $317,000

How do you get in on those deals—especially if you're not a Silicon Valley insider? How do you buy the high-tech win-ners and avoid the losers? How do you find the Yahoo!s, Microsofts, and Ciscos of tomorrow?

The answers are here, in this newly revised edition of the national bestseller The Gorilla Game. The book reveals the dynamics driving the market for high-tech stocks and out-lines the forces that catapult a select number of compa-nies to "gorilla" status—dominating the markets they serve in the way that Yahoo! dominates internet portals, Microsoft dominates software operating systems, and Cisco dominates hardware for data networks.

Follow the rules of The Gorilla Game and you will learn how to identify and invest in the "gorilla candidates" early on—while they are still fighting for dominance, and while their stocks are still cheap. When the dust clears and one company clearly attains leadership in its market, you'll reap the enormous returns that foresighted investors in high-tech companies deserve.

This new edition of The Gorilla Game has been updated and revised throughout, with new focus and new insights into choosing the internet gorillas—the companies that are destined to dominate internet commerce.

Bestselling author Geoffrey A. Moore is one of the world's leading consultants in high-tech marketing strategy. Here you'll find his groundbreaking ideas about tech-nology markets that made his previous books bestsellers, combined with the work of Paul Johnson, a top Wall Street technology analyst, and Tom Kippola, a high-tech consul-tant and highly successful private investor. Together they have discovered and played the gorilla game and now give readers the real rules for winning in the world of high-tech investing.

Step by step you'll learn how to spot a high-tech market that is about to undergo rapid growth and development, how to identify and spread investments across the potential gorillas within the market, and how to narrow your investments to the single, emerging leader—the gorilla—as the market matures.

High-tech investing can be extremely risky, but investors who learn to play the gorilla game can avoid many of the traps and pitfalls and instead start capitalizing on untold profits. Personal wealth is only a gorilla game away.

Roger Murray (1911–1998) was a crucial figure in the history of value investing. A financial professional, economist, adviser to members of Congress, and educator, Murray was the successor to the legendary Benjamin Graham as professor of the securities analysis course at Columbia Business School. There, he mentored generations of students, including Mario Gabelli, Charles Royce, Leon G. Cooperman, and Art Samberg.

This book offers a compelling account of Murray’s multifaceted career alongside a series of remarkable lectures he gave late in his life that encapsulated his philosophy of investing. The investing professionals and educators Paul Johnson and Paul D. Sonkin chronicle Murray’s life and accomplishments, capturing his professional triumphs, theoretical insights, and lasting legacy. They highlight Murray’s educational philosophy and mentorship, including personal recollections from his students about his teaching and influence.

The Enduring Value of Roger Murray features the transcripts of four lectures Murray gave in 1993, hosted by Gabelli, which became legendary in the investing community. These lectures inspired Bruce Greenwald to ask Murray to co-teach a security analysis course, leading to the resurrection of value investing education at Columbia Business School, which had waned after Murray’s retirement in 1977. Annotated by Johnson and Sonkin, these lectures are now available to a wide audience for the first time. They will be illuminating and instructive for all value investing students and practitioners today.

Featuring interviews with topflight scholars discussing their work and that of their colleagues, this retrospective of the first hundred years of Columbia Business School recounts the role of the preeminent institution in transforming education, industry, and global society. From its early years as the birthplace of value investing to its seminal influence on Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham, the school has been a profound incubator of ideas and talent, determining the direction of American business.

In ten chapters, each representing a single subject of the school's research, senior faculty members recount the collaborative efforts and innovative approaches that led to revolutionary business methods in fields like finance, economics, and accounting. They describe the pioneering work that helped create new quantitative and stochastic tools to enhance corporate decision making, and they revisit the groundbreaking twentieth-century marketing and management paradigms that continue to affect the fundamentals of global business. The volume profiles several prominent centers and programs that have helped the school adapt to recent advancements in international business, entrepreneurship, and social enterprise. Columbia Business School has long offered its diverse students access to the best leaders and thinkers in the industry. This book not only reflects on these relationships but also imagines what might be accomplished in the next hundred years.