Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: The Intelligent Investor Rev Ed.

Phenomenal book for clearing up many myths about finance

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 1, 2023

The Intelligent Investor changed my perspective on many areas of investing. The most notable of which are: 1. High reward does not require high risk
2. The difference between an "aggressive investor" and a "defensive investor" is the willingness to put in effort, not the willingness to take risks

Although this book was extremely educational, it was a very tough read. This book was much more like a textbook than.a quick read.

All in all, the Intelligent Investor is a great book for people already somewhat experienced with finance. It exposes them to new ideas. However, I would advise against people not yet comfortable with some basic concepts in finance.

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Mohammad Noroozi

A dose of reality for any soon to be investors

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 11, 2019

Verified Purchase

If you wanted one and only one take away from this book it's the following tip: "An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative." The rest of the book is about telling you how to tell the difference (e.g. buying a stock today hoping that it will go up tomorrow WOULD NOT be investing) and how to analyse a companies financials.

I began this book thinking I might have a side hobby of picking individual stocks as a side hobby. This book dispelled me of the glamour of that notion. As Benjamin Graham himself notes, a passive investor (someone who invests to at least match the average return of the stock market) can enoy success with a minimum of time while an enterprising investor (someone who works to "beat" the stock market) would only have a reasonable chance of success after doing lots of work as analysis and also having the necessary intellectual aptitude. Being an enterprising investor isn't for me because I can't dedicate the time to adequately research companies as he teaches in his book. I suspect that my situation would be the same as 99% of other people who want to invest their money.

What the book did most effectively for me is resolve my latent Dunning-Kruger effect where I imagined I could beat the intelligent people of Wall Street at their own game. I found the chapter commentaries by Jason Zweig to be especially helpful at highlighting amateur speculators who jumped into hot trends like dot com companies right before the industry collapsed. Both Jason and Ben work painstakingly to illustrate how hard it is to do the work of properly evaluating a company and establishing its true value vs its current price on the stock market or its book value (the balance of how much the companies assets are worth after already accounting for debts and liabilities).

The book helped me become literate about the different forms of investments available to me and the merits and handicaps of each. Bonds, Preferred Stocks, ETF's and Treasury Bills meant nothing to me before reading the book. Now I have a fair enough grasp of all investment tools to know what I'm getting into if I should ever choose to invest. The book is a long read as it goes through the in depth process of educating a lay person like myself but it does its job well. In that sense the book has aged marvelously with the help of modern commentary by Jason Zweig.

One drawback for me is that at various points Graham and Zweig tried to discuss how to address tax on capital income best but the advice was only relevant to an American. As a Canadian, I skipped those chapters and I had to research for myself about best reducing the taxable amount on my investment gains. Canadians might find a similar book written by a Canadian to be a better choice. Better yet, read both and be even more well prepared for investing on your own.

In the end, I decided that a balanced portfolio of ETF's tracking stocks and Canadian bonds. Being able to buy these on my own, without being hand held by a broker means that this book will probably already be saving me hundreds of dollars by the end of the year in management fees. Trust me, this book will pay for itself many times with sensible and sober advice.

In the future, I might do some angel investing for small start ups that I'm familiar with or other non-publicly traded investment opportunities. I'll only be doing that after reading many other books of the same caliber as this one. Even then, I'll be considering Graham's sagely advice to invest based on my careful assessment of what a company is actually worth, or in his words to “invest only if you would be comfortable owning a stock even if you had no way of knowing its daily share price.”

84 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Gift

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

I haven't heard anything back from the person I gave this book to.

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Peter S

Essential reading

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 31, 2023

Verified Purchase

For a book that's now 47 years old, the principles remain as current today as they did when the book was written. This edition is actually the 2003 issue with at least 4 revisions.

It's not a light read, being almost 600 pages and contains more than enough information and tools to make informed investment decisions. It should be in every serious investors library.

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Amazon Customer

Once a life must read book.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 26, 2023

Verified Purchase

I would live to keep this book for future.

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Amazon Customer

A great read for a 28-year-old

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 10, 2018

Verified Purchase

In the midst of sharp rises of cryptocurrency, booming stock market, it was difficult for me, as a 28-year-old, to sit down and read an "old" book like this one. FOMO occurred daily, but I kept reading without giving in to act to the market "just because things are going up". If Security Analysis by Mr. Graham is the science of investment, then the Intelligent Investor would be the art of investment.

I made the first attempt to read this book 2 years ago but had failed. At that time, I knew little about the stock market, the economy, how businesses work. Much of the text made no sense to me and I had eventually given up after 4 chapters. However, after getting educated by the good folks on YouTube, I was able to give this book another try. Granted, it was still very challenging, but the value that I received from it was far greater than the literary hardship I endured.

This is not a book that will get your blood to boil with excitement; it does not have tactics that offer promises of "do this and get rich". If you are here for that reason, this is not the book for you. It however, guides you to approach the art of investment with the right attitude to stock prices, fluctuations, portfolio and risk. This book provides the readers immense investment experience with an attempt to shape an aspiring investor like myself with a proper mindset.

Mr. Zweig's commentary after each chapter are mostly helpful. There are instances that I had finished a chapter without getting much of it. The commentary then explains what Mr. Graham really meant in an easy-to-understand way. However, I did find the comparisons of different companies in one of the commentaries to be quite repeated. Most of the examples from the commentary were drawn from the dot com bubble and therefore the comparisons had rather predictable endings. Though it is still valuable to witness second hand at how bad things became when it burst.

On the literary side, the language employed was slightly historical. Many sentences required me to re-read in order to understand. I think this is a good way to practise patience, as information is so easily accessible in today's world. I also got to learn a few new words from the text.

There are a lot of online commentaries on this book, as it has become almost "biblical" in value investing. I recommend the readers to use these commentaries to get a modern view of Mr. Graham's concepts.

209 people found this helpful

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Pooja Patel

overpriced

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 22, 2023

Verified Purchase

"The Intelligent Investor" is an exceptional book that imparts invaluable financial wisdom. Its content is deserving of high praise and justifies its reputation. However, potential readers should weigh the price against other available resources that cover similar topics to ensure they make a well-informed decision based on their budget and specific needs.

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Ludovic

Most important investing book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

Anyone investing need to read it

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Bernd Hornauer

Warren Buffet likes it and so do I

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

The book is very technical and a bit difficult to read. Many topics are based on the economic times in the seventies.
Very educational and a must have for somebody who want to invest long term and smart.

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William Barkhouse

Warren Buffet’s teacher wrote this book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 21, 2022

Verified Purchase

Provides insight in how to look at stocks in the market as individual businesses instead of stocks. Full of great information on valuing a company based on shares outstanding, share price and earnings per share over your investment timeline brought back to current present value. Among other lessons

One person found this helpful

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5 star		76%
4 star		14%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		2%

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