The Triumph of Contrarian Investing : Crowds, Manias, and Beating the Market by Going Against the Grain

Description

I read this book and loved it. All of the other review/criticism seem to focus on the fact that it is too simplistic or too short. If you know that going in then you won't be disappointing like they were. The charts are good resources. The 70 pages of charts illustrate one company stock chart per page. They give measure of price/dividend or price/sales ratios that indicate overly fearful and overly confident ranges. To this day, even though they are outdated, I refer to those ratios and ranges if I am doing due diligence on one of the stocks he has charted. I loaded up on Budweiser in 2005-06, in part because of their overly fearful positioning (and of course dividend and positive attributes not included in this book). That trade was hugely successful for me and these charts and range analysis added to my confidence level. If NDR wrote an updated version of this with those companies and more, and their stock charts and overlyfearful/overly confident guages, I would buy the book just as a resource. It only takes one trade, one good call to have resources MORE THAN pay themselves. I keep this one reaching distance from my desk along with about 2 dozen others I consider worthwhile. Now that it is old I would really give it a 4 star rating, but I wanted to weight the average up because I thought all the one star ratings were incredibly extreme. Buy it used or check it out from your local library, but don't let those negative reviews deprive you of seeing what nuggets you might find.