I get asked all the time by friends and investors variants of the same question:
“If you could give someone just one comprehensive book to learn about investing, what would it be”?
So we chatted about it on the podcast the other day and I still don’t have a good, single answer.
We then put together a survey and received almost 1,000 responses. I took the time to sort them, and below are the top 50 answers. (This took forever and FYI readers there is no book called “The Magic Formula”.)
Lots of books on here I’ve actually never read. A few I’ve never heard of. But even more interesting, we received suggestions for over 200 different books! That is astonishing to me…Part of me thinks “there is no one answer”, and that the learning process should be developed as more of a curriculum. But to my knowledge there isn’t a good “Rosetta Stone for Investing” website or course for that either. Hmmph, maybe a summer project…
Thanks to my readers for voting up my books, but I took out The Ivy Portfolio and Global Asset Allocation from the table…
Below are the top 10 books, in order of responses…The Intelligent Investor was #1 with 65 votes, and #2 and #3 received 49 and 24 votes. After that it quickly falls off a cliff which goes to show just how varied the opinions are…number 50 only received 5 votes, and then the next few hundred only a couple votes…
Enjoy!
1 to 10
Here, for reference are the next 40….