The book is extremely dry but is a good overview of the valuation standards in place today. It’s part of the coursework for the CFA Level II exam.

This is a great book on how to think clearly about various problems. The author gives several examples of how assumptions made can lead to erroneous conclusions. While there are tips on how to combat this tendency to prejudge a situation, the book doesn’t give a lot of useful advice. The truth is, being “mindful” takes a lot of effort and is not practical to every situation. The key is knowing when concentration is necessary and when to shut it off.

This is a pretty enjoyable surface read on Financial Statement Analysis and identifying “red flags” of business performance. This won’t make you a master stock-picker or anything of that sort, but it would serve as a great introduction to financial analysis for someone with a basic understanding of accounting. Worth reading.

Excellent! I really enjoyed this book and unlike most autobiographies Walton’s does a good job of detailing both his triumphs and his failures. Well worth reading.

This does a really good job of introducing the world to Charlie Munger, Wesco’s CEO and Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman. A must read for any Berkshire Hathaway fan. My only criticism is that the book seems to skip around and the writing is rather simplistic in parts. I would have appreciated a little more detail about Munger’s research methods. Still, the discussion on Munger’s mental models and his value system is well worth the book price.

I’m a huge Jared Diamond fan (ever since Guns, Germs, and Steel) and this book doesn’t disappoint so far.

so far I’m not at all impressed with this book. It reads like it was written by consultants (which it was). A lot of attention is applied to valuation models with very little is spent on application, financial reformulations, or the tricky things that bog down most analysts.

The sections on insurance companies and banks, while containing some useful information should have included some sort of example, as opposed to several pages that come to the conclusion that “evaluating financial companies is difficult.” I already knew that, you bonehead authors, otherwise I wouldn’t have decided to read the book and the section on evaluating these companies.

The only complaint I had with this book is that it was less concrete than Ridley’s work with “Genome”. Having finished the book I think a lot of this had to do with the highly theoretical nature of evolutionary history. Ridley uses the book more as a means of painting the evolutionary landscape and outlining the prevalent thoughts in force today and lets the reader come to their own conclusions. Still, the science has serious gaps in reasoning and he does a good job (for the most part) of pointing these out and offering his own personal theories where applicable.

serves as a good overview of Lincoln’s life and history. This is not seeking to be a definitive compendium of Lincoln but is rather a heavy, historical introduction which provides a good road map to further research if the reader decides to do it. The compendium of Lincoln references at the end of the book is alone worth the price.

So far I like the book. Porter is one of those academic deities that I think a lot of people pay lip-service to and then promptly ignore.

So far my impression is that, like all really insightful stuff dealing with strategy and management, most of this stuff seems obvious in hindsight.