The Little Book That Still Beats the Market (Little Books. Big Profits 29) Kindle Edition

In my early days of learning investing i really enjoyed this book, and I even recommended it to my friends. The idea is simply: buying undervalued good businesses and holding them long-term will eventually beat the market index.However it's bit of a fairy tale to expect something as simple as this book can make you 20%+ every year for a long time. I'm curious how many readers have actually followed this formula ... like I did. Cruel truth: over the past 2.5 years, the magic formula underperformed SP500 for more than 30% (SP500 + 20%, VS magic formula -12%). This is a huge gap to overcome, so even if i keep trying and wish everything goes well like the book says, i expect my first underperform period (vs SP500) will be at least 5-6 years.5 years of underperformance during a bull market! No normal people can stay that long simply because a book's promises. FYI I studied the capital market trend and i finally able to understand why we shouldn't follow this book at all. There are simply too many flaws in logic for individuals like me.Anyway, you all are welcomed to try, some of you may actually be able to do pretty well, but I'm sure at the end most of us are still better off just sticking to indexing . May the force be with you.

I have mixed emotions... the book was very simple me easy to read as an investment newby. The book promises you this magic formula, which it does explain in detail but that’s really all the book was about and it strongly discourages you from investing on your own. I was hoping for some more broad info about the stock market and stuff. At the end of the book, there’s a link to his free website, where you can use the computer system that generates the “magic formula” so I guess that’s pretty cool. He has a mutual fund where he uses the formula that you can buy into for a 1% fee. I feel like the whole book and the website are just there to make you buy into this fund so he can make money. You could do without his fund and use the formula yourself but I’m not sure how confident I am in my stock market skills yet.

I discovered the love of the stock market through this. Well explained, a good place to start, and broken down at a beginner's level.You are going to learn about the stock market and ratios. It was very useful when I bought it 3 years ago. Since then, I realized that everything you need and want to learn is readily available for free.However, had i followed the advise within, I'd have lost money when using their formulas. For example, one of the constants in the website from the book is Gilead. In three years since I bought this book, Gilead still not making investors money outside of the dividends provided.

Reads well for the first 4 chapters, but I kept reading trying to figure out what the "magic formula " was. I felt like the author was saying the same thing different ways, 1. Buy good companies that have high earnings 2. Buy them at bargain prices. .... duhBy chapter 9 I felt like I had nothing more to learn and stopped reading. There is no magic formula and if there was, it's not fool proof. Author referred me to their website. It's the perfect "upsell"What you find in this book, you could YOUTUBE for free

At 80, I have just discovered this book and enjoyed it more than any other book I've read (well, at least more than any book I REMEMBER reading). The book starts slow, as if to disguise how good it really is. By chapter 6 I was laughing out loud, at the statistical simplicity, shear elegance, and ironic effectiveness of this investment approach. I've a masters in general experimental psychology and have taught graduate level statistics, so I have some background from which to reasonably allege that this is a great book. Don't miss it. Don't let the negative reviews dissuade you. This is a sincere book written by an obvious expert who has the humility to acknowledge the well established fact that most investment advisors can't beat the market. He's come up with a simple method that works, tested it, and is sharing it. You probably won't do better than this. Yet of course you probably will think you can. Which is what makes this so much fun. Is it statistics, investing advice, psychology, or zen? Just read it - and if you do, don't miss the depth that's disguised with simplicity. Don't miss the irony of a guy who wrote this to explain why you probably can't do any better than this who then spends his career managing investment funds. And writing more books. If you don't think THAT is humor, rate yourself dull normal at best! Enjoy. If you don't enjoy this book, feel free to write a scathing review of this review!

The Good: Its a short entertaining book that you can finish in a few days of casual reading. The investing strategy presented appears to work (at least over the 19 years described).The Not so Good: After reading a bunch of academic papers where investing strategies are rigorously back tested over 50-80+ year time frames I was a bit shocked to see the original version of this book listed a '17 year' back test period. Why 17 years and not 15? Why not 20 years? Why choose the back test period that has a huge long bull market (80s and 90s)? Seems a bit like curve fitting the data to me and without a good explanation from the author on why those 17 years were chosen we are left to wonder. Thankfully this updated version includes 4 'out of sample' years which start from 2005 and end in 2009 showing that the strategy seems to have held up by outperforming the S&P over that 4 year period (not each year but over the 4 years total). Furthermore, you are buying and selling 30 stocks each year this will have tax consequences (unless you are investing through an IRA or 401k) and transaction costs which were not really mentioned.

A book clearly written as something of a children's introduction to stocks. The book makes sense, is a fairly accurate, if dumbed down, exploration of the basics of stock trading, and can provide the faintest of outlines of a method you can try to use if you want to be a day trader. But that is unlikely unless you've already got enough money that day trading is an excuse not to get an actual job. The upshot of it all is "here's how you theoretically beat the market" and "use my secret formula" which turns out to be a free online program that records trends and suggests worthwhile stocks. Sound too good to be true? The author says so himself: it is. It is an algorithm that does a slightly better job than an actual broker, which is to say it doesn't do a great job. The program has shown below average results since this book was originally released. The author implores you to stay with it because he cites data "proving" its predictions could have made you a multi millionaire from the late 70's to early 2000's, but perfect hindsight will have that effect. I don't know whether the author believed his program could make millionaires or if he even cares beyond making a quick buck from a book written in one afternoon. In all, it's a good introduction to stock trading, if you haven't hit puberty yet. I would hazard to even call it stocks 101, so you would do well to spend your money on a book with more substance, which won't be hard.

It does beat the market of that I have no doubt but where it falls at the first hurdle for me at age 63 is time. I simply do not have enough time for the strategy to work or the nerves to watch my stocks fall and hopefully rise again. By the time the market wakes up to the value in the stocks it recommends I might be dead. A brilliant book which is well worth the read. If you are on the last leg like myself you could do a lot worse than order Stan Weinsteins book at the same time. I have no doubt that if I had bought this book twenty years ago I would be a very happy and wealthy man now.

Simply explained for a beginner but biased towards magic formula which makes sense but have to have a fairly high risk appetite. This is not a book that teaches you how to beat the market through traditional means. It's more of a follow this computer driven model to make investing easy for those not interested in the intricacies of analysis. Very easy read and worth buying to gain a fundamental understanding of the markets

I found the book an interesting and enjoyable read. He has managed to make what on the face of it can be a very dry and vanilla subject matter, for the non-aficionado's, into a humorous and also very useful read and has managed to condense that into about 180 odd pages. Its very good value and can be read in an afternoon.

Very good and easy read book to help understand how the stock market works (or doesn't at times) and why the only way to make money is to do the research on possible company stocks