Here are 25 books that Intelligent Fanatics Project fans have personally recommended if you like
Intelligent Fanatics Project.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have been investing in markets for nearly 30 years. I remember first being interested in the stock market after the 1987 crash. I read everything I could about Warren Buffett. And went on to study finance in college finishing magna cum laude (and later earned my MBA). I started my professional career as a commercial banker in the early 1990s. Then, I started my own investment newsletter in 2004 and compiled a strong track record over the next 12 years, wrote four books, and traveled all over the world in search of great investment ideas. I’ve appeared as a guest on TV and radio shows, as well as numerous podcasts. In 2019, I co-founded Woodlock House Family Capital where I currently manage a portfolio of global investments.
The classic from 1972 is the book that inspired me to write 100 Baggers. Phelps studied all the stocks that returned at least 100 to 1 from 1932 to 1971. You’ll learn where to look for 100 to 1 stocks and what key traits to focus on. Phelps writes in a folksy and quotable manner as he expounds on his philosophy of buying right and holding on. He writes, “When I was a boy a carpenter working for my father made this sage observation: ‘A lot of shavings don’t make a good workman.’” Let Phelps show you the power of patient, long-term investing.
In 100 to 1 in the Stock Market, Thomas Phelps discloses the secrets and strategies to increasing your wealth one hundredfold through buy-and-hold investing. Unlike the short-term trading trends that are popular today, Phelps's highly logical, yet radical approach focuses on identifying compounding machines in public markets, buying their stocks, and holding these investments long term for at least ten years. In this indispensable guide, Phelps analyzes what made the big companies of his day so profitable for the diligent, long-term investor. You will learn how to identify and invest in profitable business models without visible growth ceilings that will…
I have been investing in markets for nearly 30 years. I remember first being interested in the stock market after the 1987 crash. I read everything I could about Warren Buffett. And went on to study finance in college finishing magna cum laude (and later earned my MBA). I started my professional career as a commercial banker in the early 1990s. Then, I started my own investment newsletter in 2004 and compiled a strong track record over the next 12 years, wrote four books, and traveled all over the world in search of great investment ideas. I’ve appeared as a guest on TV and radio shows, as well as numerous podcasts. In 2019, I co-founded Woodlock House Family Capital where I currently manage a portfolio of global investments.
Jack Welch of GE fame was long thought to be a great CEO. GE’s stock compounded at a rate of 20.9% annually under his watch. If you invested $1 when he took the reins, that dollar would’ve been worth $48 when Immelt succeeded him 20 years later. Welch beat the S&P index 3.3x, a great record. Thorndike studies eight CEOs that collectively beat the S&P by over 20x. How did they do it? Thorndike clearly shows how these elite CEOs used a distinctive toolkit to create massive gains. A must-have guide for investors looking for big winners.
"An outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation." -- Warren Buffett #1 on Warren Buffett's Recommended Reading List, Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Letter, 2012 Named one of "19 Books Billionaire Charlie Munger Thinks You Should Read" in Business Insider. "A book that details the extraordinary success of CEOs who took a radically different approach to corporate management." -- Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation "Thorndike explores the importance of thoughtful capital allocation through the stories of eight successful CEOs. A good read for any business leader but especially those willing to chart their own course." -- Michael…
I have been investing in markets for nearly 30 years. I remember first being interested in the stock market after the 1987 crash. I read everything I could about Warren Buffett. And went on to study finance in college finishing magna cum laude (and later earned my MBA). I started my professional career as a commercial banker in the early 1990s. Then, I started my own investment newsletter in 2004 and compiled a strong track record over the next 12 years, wrote four books, and traveled all over the world in search of great investment ideas. I’ve appeared as a guest on TV and radio shows, as well as numerous podcasts. In 2019, I co-founded Woodlock House Family Capital where I currently manage a portfolio of global investments.
If you want to own stocks for a long time to go after those 100 baggers, you’ll need to own quality assets that you don’t need to trade frequently. This book will give you an important framework for how to evaluate business quality. There are good discussions here on competitive advantages, pricing power, industry structure, and brand strength, among other things. The book has plenty of examples and is not long or hard to read.
Quality. We all make judgments about it every day. Yet articulating a clear definition of quality in an investing context is challenging. This book addresses the challenge, and distills years of practical investing experience into a definitive account of this under-explored investment philosophy. Finance theory has it that abnormal outcomes do not persist, that exceptional performance will soon enough become average performance. Quality investing involves seeking companies with the right attributes to overcome these forces of mean reversion and, crucially, owning these outstanding companies for the long term. This book pinpoints and explains the characteristics that increase the probability of…
I am the Founder of Stellar Wealth Partners, a SEBI-registered Research Analyst firm and small case manager for investors in the Indian stock market. I am the author of the international best-seller on value investing, The Joys of Compounding. Once a strong foundation is created for a business, owners don’t work for money. Rather, money works for them. As an investor, your money is working for you 24/7. You are becoming wealthier with each passing second, alongside the increasing intrinsic value of your businesses. An investor builds earnings power through a business ownership mindset.
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).
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, leading fund manager Terry Smith delights in debunking the many myths of investing - and making the case for simply buying the best companies in the world.
These are businesses that generate serious amounts of cash and know what to do with it. The result is a powerful compounding of returns that is almost impossible to beat. Even better, they aren't going anywhere. Most have survived the Great Depression…
I grew up in featureless suburbia, where the streets of identical bungalows seemed scrubbed of anything miraculous. Maybe that’s why I came to be fascinated, as a kid, with the idea of tiny things. Here was magic that might exist in my backyard: miniature people trooping through lawns as if they were forests, riding ladybugs, and carrying bramblethorn spears! These daydreams formed some of the first stories I wrote, as a child. And they’ve continued to fascinate me as a reader, and a writer, ever since. I’ve tried to pick stories that might have slipped out of sight amongst ‘bigger’ brethren like The Burrowersand Gulliver’s Travels. I hope you enjoy them!
A Tom Thumb-type fable, and the first story about the miniature that I remember being enthralled by. Anton B. Stanton sails a castle moat like it’s a sea, and gets captured by Pirats (I didn’t get the lame pun until I was a grown-up and buying the book for my own son). It was the first book that held out the promise of tiny, miraculous adventures happening right under my nose.
A boy no bigger than a tea cup is forced to walk the plank by his rat captors and then returns to their pirate ship to free the kidnapped water rat princess.
Madina Papadopoulos is a New Orleans-born, New York-based freelance writer and author. She is currently working on the sequel to The Step-Spinsters, the first in the Unspun Fairytale series, which retells classic princess stories set in the late Middle Ages. She studied French and Italian at Tulane University and received her MFA in screenwriting at UCLA. After teaching foreign languages at the university level, as well as in childhood and elementary school programs, she developed and illustrated foreign language coloring workbooks for preschoolers. As a freelance writer, she focuses on food, drinks, and entertainment.
Danièle Cybulskie, AKA “the 5 Minute Medievalist,” is a Medieval Influencer with books, a podcast, and blogs, all offering the world quickly digestible knowledge of this millennium in history. In her book, Life in Medieval Europe, Fact and Fiction, she takes us through a fun game of True or False. The grouping of the Middle Ages spans a confusingly long time, from around the late 400s to the late 1400s. Various traditions can be fit into those thousand years, one would think that by sheer probability most of our Medieval stereotypes would fit into one of those centuries. Interestingly enough, a good amount of what films set in Medieval Times is hilariously incorrect. Pick it up and start your guessing.
Have you ever found yourself watching a show or reading a novel and wondering what life was really like in the Middle Ages? What did people actually eat? Were they really filthy? And did they ever get to marry for love?
In Medieval Europe in Fact and Fiction, you'll find fast and fun answers to all your secret questions, from eating and drinking to sex and love. Find out whether people bathed, what they did when they got sick, and what actually happened to people accused of crimes. Learn about medieval table manners, tournaments, and toothpaste, and find out if…
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even…
I have been to Europe a handful of times, exploring Paris, Italy, Malta, Spain, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Amsterdam. Europe lends itself perfectly to be immortalised in literature. The continent is steeped in thousands of years of charming history, oozing out of the cobblestoned streets and painted in layers on the buildings. Scratch the surface and a new, richer layer comes to the fore, exciting and amazing anew. Europe inevitably turns into one of the important characters in any book set there and many a writer have managed to capture its essence in their work. Alongside Peter Sarstedt, Europe inspired my work, taking the reader along on a wondrous journey.
Dick and Angel set off on a life-changing adventure. They purchase a Chateau in France and start the involved process of restoring it to its former glory. The chateau becomes a central character in their story, alongside the glorious Loire Valley. You may have seen the TV show based on their exploits, but the book is so much better!
THE ENTERTAINING AND HEARTWARMING SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER.
Like many couples, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th-century fairytale chateau, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat.
Throwing caution to the wind, Dick and Angel swapped their two-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with their two young children Arthur and…
I’m an investor from three perspectives or dimensions. First, I manage money for individuals and institutions as Chief Investment Officer of Beacon Trust, a $4 billion registered investment advisor based in NY/NJ. Second, I teach MBA classes in investing at Rutgers Business School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, and Hong Kong University (HKU) Business School. Third, I write articles and books on investing, including The Art of Investing: Lesson’s from History’s Greatest Tradersand Buffett’s Tips: A Guide to Financial Literacy and Life. I’ve personally met Warren Buffett on four separate occasions and think he is an excellent role model from both investing and personal perspectives.
Buffett is probably not thrilled with this book, written by his ex-daughter-in-law, but I think it provides the best insight into his investment process. Mary Buffett was married to Buffett’s son Peter, and David Clark is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) that skillfully explains some of the more technical aspects of investing. For example, the book discussed how Buffett values a stock. He primarily considers companies with a “moat” so he has confidence in forecasting their cash flows. He then projects these cash flows out at least ten years and discounts them back to the present to estimate their value. He will only buy at a significant discount to this estimated or “intrinsic” value.
Here at last is a book that reveals what the public really wants to know about this legendary investor: how he determines where he puts his money. From a team with privileged insight, Mary Buffett, a savvy CEO and Warren Buffett's former daughter-in-law, and David Clark, a successful portfolio analyst, comes Buffettology, the most detailed explanation ever of the billionaire's unique investment techniques. Using Warren Buffett's system to access a company's potential economic excellence and the right price to pay for its stock, Buffettology demonstrates the actual mathematical models and equations, revolving around three variables: the yearly per share earnings…
I'm fascinated by how our world operates, from the macro-level to the microlevel and metaphysics. It creates more depth and makes life infinitely colorful and exciting, even in the most mundane things. I've been studying personal development and spirituality for almost 20 years now, and I find the journey of growth and becoming to be rewarding. Books that help me expand my horizon and think differently enable this process, and I find that to be exciting.
Known as the Warren Buffer of Japan, Wahei Takeda was a billionaire and investor living in Japan that passed away in 2016. He had a philosophy of life that built upon the concept of gratitude. A mentor of mine met and studied with this man, and he shared that every day, every day, he has a practice of giving 1,000 gratitude. Not figuratively, but honestly, living in a state of gratitude. I have tried this and go back to the practice of giving 1,000 when I need to shake myself out of a rut. It’s transformational, and it’s hard. It usually takes me three days before I can get to 1,000 and the last 600 pushes me to see beyond the surface. Give it a try!
This is the story of Japan’s largest private investor, Wahei Takeda: how he made his fortune and how he thinks about money—making it, investing it and using it for good in the world—based on his profound teaching of maro, the core principle of his way of life and the foundation of his success. By learning about maro through the example of Wahei’s life, you can also become financially successful—and profoundly happy to boot.
Often called “the Warren Buffet of Japan,” Wahei Takeda is the most successful investor in the country, and no doubt he’s the happiest one, too! My success…
I’m Darius Foroux (pronounced Dare-eus For-oe), and thanks for exploring my recommendations. As a former mutual funds advisor, I understand the complexity of finance, a lesson driven home when I lost two-thirds of my investment in 2007. Not wanting to repeat my costly mistakes, I earned degrees in business and finance, launched a business, and continuously educated myself on investing. The biggest thing I learned? Investing and wealth-building aren’t logical but emotional. I'm passionate about helping others achieve financial independence and live on their terms. My book empowers you to manage your emotions, build wealth, and enjoy life, regardless of the stock market's ups and downs.
As mentioned, I’m a big fan of Buffett’s investing strategy. That’s because it can be applied by anyone, even those who don’t work in finance–while yielding a good profit. Since I don’t want to be stressing over the markets daily, the best fit is a passive investing strategy.
This book gathers 50 years of Warren Buffett’s letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, a great way to better understand the man’s thinking process. Buffett doesn’t only talks about how investing really works, he also shares his philosophy for life.
Warren E. Buffett first took control of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a small textile company, in April of 1965. A share changed hands for around $18 at the time. Fifty letters to shareholders later, the same share traded for $226,000, compounding investor capital at just under 21% per year-a multiplier of 12,556 times.
This book compiles the full, un-edited versions of 50 years of Warren Buffett's letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. In addition to providing an astounding case study on Berkshire's success, Buffett shows an incredible willingness to share his methods and act as a teacher to his many…
