Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I gave it three stars. It was a good book, but not as good as it could have been. How could it have been better?
First, though the introduction indicates that the author had access to many of the investors profiled, there are precious few statements in the investors' own words about what THEY THINK about their mistakes. It seemed like most of the book was just culled from newspaper accounts.
Second, I don't know specifically how the author could have avoided this (admittedly, it's the point of the book I suppose), but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the guy on the sidelines employing 20/20 hindsight to critique the missteps of the guy who was actually in the arena. A great book called the Halo Effect makes the compelling case that so much supposed business analysis is simply ex post narration of what happened as though it was inevitable (if a new product works, they were bold and smart, if it fails, they "strayed from their core competencies"). For instance, in the Cooperman chapter, Cooperman is criticized for playing in an inefficient market with little information. But that's the whole point: homeruns are found in inefficient markets where no one is looking. If he had been right, we'd all say he was a genius. I guess what I'm saying is that I resist the notion that there is always some folly or brilliance at work in a given investment.
Although I'm skeptical that each mistake can be distilled down to pithy truths as the book implies, I still think it's worth reading. The biographical backgrounds in each chapter are interesting and inspiring to any aspiring investor, and the reader will gain insights into how each investor approaches investing generally, even if that's a more complicated thing than a few bullet points can convey.
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