My favorite books on value investing from a longtime investor

In this book, Peter Lynch teaches how a common investor can get great returns from his investment in the stock market if he follows a few general investing principles and a common-sense investing approach. Lynch believes that with a little research and steady discipline, every common person can outperform the so-called investment gurus and make good returns. He suggests that many great investments could be right under their nose, if the investor is ready to do some research. Most people just have to look around the place where they work or the spots where they visit to grab those opportunities. A common person is exposed to many interesting local companies and products years before professional investors would even hear of them. If these investors find and invest in these growing local companies, they can make handsome returns.

There are in general two approaches to accumulating wealth in the stock market. One is to time the market, buying stocks when they are cheap, and selling when they are expensive. The other is to find outstanding companies and hold them for the long term. Fisher prefers the latter. He recommends that investors should focus on finding stocks that have the highest profit compared to risk. The public often misinterprets this as meaning stocks that are the most undervalued, rather than those with prospects for the highest growth for the longest duration. High growth over many years outweighs the advantages of an undervalued stock with no growth potential due to compounded returns.

Some people love to make successful investing seem more complicated than it really is. In this anthology of essays and letters written between 2010–20, Terry Smith makes the case for simply buying the best companies in the world. These are businesses that generate large amounts of cash and know what to do with it in the form of sound capital allocation. The result is a powerful compounding of returns for the long term.

This book serves as a good reiteration of the thinking and principles underpinning Smith’s investing approach, including his three-step investment mantra: “Buy good companies. Don’t overpay. Do nothing.” It also highlights the nuances of the process, including why Smith favors return on capital employed (ROCE) and free cash flow (FCF) yield as metrics for assessing companies and why Smith is less enamored of measures such as earnings per share (EPS).

Capital Returns is a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practical implementation of the capital cycle approach to investment. Chancellor says a capital cycle consists of two phases: ‘expansion,’ where the industry production/servicing capacity is increased, and ‘contraction’ where the capacity is reduced by selling assets. With excess profitability, a company or industry’s returns start increasing. This excess profitability attracts new entrants and competitors into it and as they start investing, it results in increased capacity, which leads to a decline in profit, and thus, businesses have to exit capacity and consolidate. When such businesses exit, there is reduced investment and, hence, lower supply, which in turn leads to an increase in profits. Chancellor believes investors who can understand this aspect of the capital cycle can take advantage of the change in the situation and earn good returns.

The book outlines an array of “special situations” that may offer very profitable opportunities, i.e. bankruptcies, restructurings, merger securities, and spinoffs, among others. Greenblatt underscores the importance of a set of basic ‘rules’ when delving into the universe of special situations: do your own work, don’t trust anyone, pick your spot and assess the downside, not the upside. The basic premise of the book is that it pays off to search for areas where there is a high probability of finding undervalued equities. You can make a lot of money sticking to the tried-and-true method of investing in and holding good companies for many years. However, if you are a more experienced investor looking for other areas to invest part of your portfolio in, this book will give you several new places to explore.