5 Responses to “Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment”

1. 
   Toby, on September 27th, 2009 at 4:11 pm Said:

   Many have tried to repackage the bible of fundamental analysis, Graham and Dodd. This is merely a generic version of the same in pablum form to attract the gullible investing public. I have studied others such as Samuelson, Friedman, etc and these are the acknowledged and accepted standard bearers of analysis. Now for the author to attempt to attack the well documented success of Fidelity Management’s Lynch, Vinick, and Legg Mason’s Miller who have recorded uninterrupted consecutive annual profitable investment returns and to recommend indexing is a joke and erely an attempot to prey upon the public.
   Rating: 1 / 5

2. 
   John Beirne, on September 27th, 2009 at 5:52 pm Said:

   David Swenson while having done a fantastic job for Yale fails to understad what the individual investor goes through,especially in bear markrts,and in fact there are many financial advisors who have added value to investors portfolios. Do it yourself doesn’t work. The late nineties proved that.
   Rating: 3 / 5

3. 
   Anthony J. DeToto, on September 27th, 2009 at 6:52 pm Said:

   I loved David Swensen’s white paper about institutional portfolio construction; I liked his book on Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment- with this book he stepped outside his area of expertise.

   Rating: 2 / 5

4. 
   a reader, on September 27th, 2009 at 7:01 pm Said:

   This book wants to be at least two different books:

   1) A book slamming the mutual fund industry
   2) A book giving new investors basic descriptions of different asset classes and the behavior to expect from them.

   On the first point, I don’t know why he bothered. Anyone who has done any research on mutual funds and how they have been run in recent years will already know all of this. The only addition was the information on some of the newest ETFs and how they aren’t so great. This is worthless repetition of common information.

   On the second point, it would be OK for some new investors, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.

   In the end his strongest point seems to be that the investment world is strongly against the small individual investor. Great, thanks a lot. Why not use all of your years of experience to give us some help? Telling us the most available options are worthless and then not giving us anywhere to go isn’t useful.
   Rating: 2 / 5

5. 
   Rajeev Prasad, on September 27th, 2009 at 7:50 pm Said:

   Excellent. The “new” guru of portfolio theory/asset allocation and passive/low-cost/index fund investing for individual investors.
   Rating: 5 / 5