Audiobook4 hours
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: Including a Life-Cycle Guide to Personal Investing
Written by Burton G. Malkiel
Narrated by George Guidall
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
The best investment guide money can buy, with more than 1.5 million copies sold, now fully revised and updated. Today's stock market is not for the faint of heart. At a time of frightening volatility, what is the average investor to do? The answer: turn to Burton G. Malkiel's advice in his reassuring, authoritative, gimmick-free, and perennially best-selling guide to investing. Long established as the first book to purchase before starting a portfolio or 401(k), A Random Walk Down Wall Street now features new material on "tax-loss harvesting," the crown jewel of tax management; the current bitcoin bubble; and automated investment advisers; as well as a brand-new chapter on factor investing and risk parity. And as always, Malkiel's core insights?on stocks and bonds, as well as real estate investment trusts, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles? along with the book's classic life-cycle guide to investing, will help restore confidence and composure to anyone seeking a calm route through today's financial markets.
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Reviews for A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Rating: 4.079852446928747 out of 5 stars
4/5
407 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a text used in a class i am teaching. It is interesting, full of advice that sometimes conflicts. Good over view of the market and current Valuation theories.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For those who are thinking of picking this up, I would put it a little past the beginner stage but before the intermediate stage on investing. Malkiel's attempt in this book is to convince you that for all the tricks and news ways of assessment of the market, most are bunk. His point is that if you want to best guarantee growth on your investment the best way would be to buy mutual funds in an index with long term history of growth.
What I appreciate with Malkiel's claim is that he provides a look at a lot of assessments and really makes his point. One of the best examples he gives is against relying on the "experts". His example says that if you take 100 people who flip a coin and to keep them in the pool they have to flips heads every time, there is a good chance you'll come up with 10 people who will flip heads up until the 10th time. That doesn't make them experts.
Malkiel also does a decent job of not being dogmatic and helping people who want to take on more risk to take the best route.
There are a few areas that he doesn't seem to cover and it's not surprising considering he's not writing from an Austrian economics perspective. He doesn't cover the issues with bonds and as of this review being written there are some countries that have negative rates. Also there is no talk about how government regulation negatively effect certain investments. And there are a few times when he tells the read to rely on the FDIC even though there is no way the FDIC can back even 1% of total money in the banks.
However, Malkiel makes his claims well and the subject is written for those who have gotten their feet wet in the market. It's a good book to read if you're really going to start investing more. It's not just a book about warning but Malkiel does offer some good and helpful advice. Final Grade - B - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Random Walk Down Wall Street gets its title from Malkiel's view that markets are mostly efficient and therefore stocks' prices take into account all available information and that their day to day movements are random and difficult if not impossible to predict. This leads him to an investing philosophy much like Vanguard group's Bogle (Malkiel is a trustee) which is to veer away from trying to pick individual stocks and to go with a low-cost index fund. But while Bogle very much limited his recommended choice to a few funds that represented the market, like the S&P 500 Index, and some bond index funds, Malkiel's investment portfolio is more expansive. He agrees that Bogle's choices should be a person's bedrock foundation, but also allows for other vehicles like Multi Factor Smart Beta, REITs, ETFs, and a few others. His book is no Little Book of Investing and therefore he has chapters on various historical and contemporary bubbles, theories of investing, asset management, and retirement planning, topics not covered in Bogle's book. At 300+ pages, it looks intimidating when you first flip through it, with multiple sections, chapters, tables, and graphs. But for the most part it is extremely plainly written for the lay investor and with a few exceptions here and there, pretty easy to follow. It's also actionable. While I did not go out and buy any new products after finishing it, I did review my asset allocation and determined that I may be too heavily invested in stocks for my age and I turned on my rebalancer. Much of your own decision making will come down to your particular risk tolerance - what Malkiel refers to as your risk to sleep index. If you can tolerate a lot of risk and not lose any sleep over what many feel is an inevitable drop, you may want to go all in on the current bull market even into retirement.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Let's talk about the Random Walk. The stockmarket is a game of chance - you might as well flip a coin to determine which way prices are going. In fact tossing is preferable because researching shares or paying professionals takes time and costs money.The Random Walk attacks the tenets of professional fund management: that investors can pick shares trading at a lower price than their true value or traders can spot trends in price movements and exploit them.Malkiel marshals an army of statisticians, back-testing the more common investment strategies and finding them wanting. Sure you may win in the short-term, but that is lady luck. In the long-run, once you take costs into account, all bets are off.I do not buy it. Back-testing is fine and dandy but does it actually prove anything? Real investors - and I am talking about private investors here - change their strategies, exercise judgement and break the rules. They are not slaves to the slide-rule.While it is common knowledge that professional money managers are doomed to fail, I suspect private investors have a better chance of beating the market. The problem is private investors are by nature shy animals.Just because I disagree with his thesis does not mean I do not think you should bother with the book. Malkiel is articulate and his tour through fundamental analysis, technical analysis, modern portfolio theory and the capital asset pricing model is as good as any introduction I have read.I just cannot bring myself to believe anomalies do not exist when I see them all around me. You know - internet bubbles, overreactions, Warren Buffet. Even Malkiel sees anomalies. But in his world they are rare, difficult to profit from and vanish once common knowledge.He even has an investment trust habit. C'mon Mr Malkiel admit it - inside every index-hugger is a stock picker desperate to get out. It is more fun!___A word of warning for British readers. The first three chapters are theory, it is a universal language. The fourth is a practical guide, less practical for us because it is written in American: all IRA's and Keogh plans. Still you can translate some of it and derive general principles from the rest.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Read the 2007 edition, some of the information are outdated but most of them are still useful.
Great explanations for beginners.
Yes, this book is biased even Malkiel said so himself but so all any other investment book.
If you are looking for a book to explore your retirement investment(long-term, low risk) options, this is a great book to start with.
Loved the EBITDA joke "earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor" - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Professors teaching security analysis in business schools face an interesting dilemma: We teach people how to identify situations where a stock’s price and intrinsic value may differ, despite the fact that a substantial portion of our academic training strongly suggests that security markets are efficient to the point that such activity is unlikely to lead to abnormal profits over time. While it is certainly possible to reconcile these polemical positions—for instance, when there is a cost to acquiring and processing financial information—the more interesting question probably involves establishing which view of the world defines an individual’s core belief. My own opinion is that investors are far better off in the long run with a null hypothesis that markets are efficient; this creates the burden of having to convince themselves why price and value might differ in a particular situation. Within this context, Malkiel’s book is the most compelling and user-friendly statement of the nature and portfolio implications of the efficient market hypothesis that an investor could hope to find. I have used it as a supplementary text in my classes for years and it remains an insightful and highly entertaining reference.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book has two thrusts. First, it shows that random picks outdo almost all fund managers; the fund managers that do better don't continue to do so; and the likelihood of beating random picks consistently allows for the tiny handful of managers who do. This part of the book is rock solid and has earned it its monumental reputation.The second thrust is that, since active management does worse than random selection, you're better off with an index fund. This is a logically sound deduction. Then, the American investing-for-retirement public decided that buying index funds was the way to secure their retirement---which let down many following 2007. Even today, many believe that retirement is best achieved by investing heavily in target date funds that optimize a mix of assets (a key component of modern portfolio theory being diversity), taking them back to the original problem: can a fund group pick the allocation better than random throws at a dartboard?In my opinion (not worth two cents), the finance research comprising the first thrust above was classic. Malkiel then transmuting it into a recipe for retirement was a mistake. We still don't know what the "best" way to invest for retirement is.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It's a bit USA-centric, but if you read one book about investing in stocks or mutual funds it should be this one. I've read the 7th edition from 1999.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book courageously opposes all the categories of voodoo that tempt the born-a-minute fools swarming the worldwide securities markets. Yes, you may make ninety percent timing the market today, but you will lose just as much the next day and the next. And then you have to pay your broker. And the tax man. Better to buy index funds and hold them until you retire. If that's too boring for you, take five percent of your money and speculate with that. But don't fool yourself into thinking that you can beat the market. Avalanches of data show that market timing is not a matter of skill, but luck. And any gains will be shaved to uselessness by the Uncle Sam and your broker.Even the seemingly scientific techniques of technical analysis are destroyed in the blast of Malkiel's empirical artillery. Markets are random. Trends reverse without warning. Your head and shoulders pattern is not going to make you money. Sorry. Yes, Malkiel's thesis is "buy and hold." But he's not trying to depress you with his thesis; he's trying to help you make as much money as possible with your investments. If you need to gamble, Malkiel gives advice for gambling in the sanest possible way. This book is a frank, level-headed approach to squeezing the best returns from your invested dollars. And, after more than 30 years in print, there is no point in trying to argue against Random Walk. If you really feel the need to get disgustingly rich on Wall Street, open a brokerage already.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Classic! I first read this in college in 1986. It was good then, but I was too naive to fully appreciate it. I read it again in 2005 and realized this is a tremendous book. If you're looking for a book to show you where to make a quick buck, this is not the book for you. The author explains the wisdom of keeping your eye on the fundamentals of investing. If you tend to fall for "can't miss" investments, buy this book. It might cure you.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is really helpful as on overall primer on investing sensibly. I feel like you have to have some minimal knowledge of finance to get the most out of it, but it really is very accessible in general. A good book for someone who wants to get the most out of their money without forking it all over to financial advisors. Reads a little like a textbook, but that's pretty much what it is.