A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Burton G. Malkiel
Copyright 1975, 1981, 1990, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2012
Read: 5/4/2021
My Rating: 5/5
An exhaustive look at active vs passive investing. If you want every last detail with tons of studies to back up everything, then this is the book for you.
From the first line where he starts with "It has now been forty years since I began writing the first edition of A Random Walk" you know that a lot of thought has been put into this book. And the book has stood the test of time. It's been revised consistently over the years and most recently in 2020 for the 12th edition.
The 1 star Amazon reviews are insightful. Half are complaining the copy of the book they received was damaged in shipping somehow. And the other half, are just kind of out there. Personally I love the guy that got mad because "I thought this book would teach me to trade stocks, it sucks". Not the target audience I guess. Lol.
About the only warning I can give about this book, is that it's not a good "first finance" book. It has a ton of detail and introduces an absolute wave of ideas and definitions. Complete, but completeness comes at the cost of a lot of information to absorb. Definitely a great 2nd book for those that want details, and indispensable if you are unsure if index funds are really the way to go.
I also got a chuckle on this chapter on picking stocks that starts with "For those that insist on playing the game themselves". You can almost hear the sigh in his voice. Which he follows up with "even sensible rules such as these are unlikely to lead to superior performance", just in case you didn't get it from his first sentence.