The Big Secret for the Small Investor

The Shortest Route to Long-Term Investment Success

By: Joel Greenblatt

Narrated by: Adam Grupper

When it comes to investing in the stock market, investors have plenty of options:

• They can do it themselves. Trillions of dollars are invested this way. (Of course, the only problem here is that most people have no idea how to analyze and choose individual stocks. Well, not really the only problem. Most investors have no idea how to construct a stock portfolio, most have no idea when to buy and sell, and most have no idea how much to invest in the first place.)
• They can give it to professionals to invest. Trillions of dollars are invested this way.(Unfortunately most professionals actually underperform the market averages over time. In fact,it may be even harder to pick good professional managers than it is to pick good individual stocks.)
• They can invest in traditional index funds. Trillions of dollars are also invested this way.(The problem is that investing this way is seriously flawed--and almost a guarantee of subpar investment returns over time.)
• They can read The Big Secret for the Small Investor and do something else. Not much is invested this way. Yet....

Let top hedge fund manager, Columbia business school professor, former Fortune 500 chairman and New York Times best-selling author Joel Greenblatt take you on a journey that will reveal the Big Secret for both individual and professional investors. Based on path-breaking new research, find out how anyone can beat the market, the index funds and the experts by following a new approach that relies on the principles of value investing, common sense and quantitative discipline. Along the way, learn where "value" comes from, how markets work, and what really happens on Wall Street. By journey's end, small investors (and even not-so-small investors) will have found their way to some excellent new investment choices.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2011 Joel Greenblatt (P)2011 Simon & Schuster

SKIP IT - Action Plan Missing

While the book rehashes the fundamentals of value investing fund in his other books, it falls flat on actionability. Likely due to the passing of time, the "ideal" funds proposed and recommended by the book don't exist in 2024. Very disappointed to have paid for this book as it offered nothing new to act upon.

Fantastic!

Joel's writing style, personality, and investing insights are eye opening. It is a fantastic book.

great book

he brings a lot of facts in a short amount of time. he makes it easy to understand what he wants you to know so that you can decide for yourself if it makes sense.

algo basico

entre menos sepas, mejor lo encontrarás. puede ser un primer libro para empezar a ver donde invertir. no para portafolios activamente administrados

Fundamental value

very good pieces of advice for fundamental value investors. Some good explanations about how the market works, stocks, ETFs.

Short, to the point

Enjoyed. Great point of view, backed by research. Oriented for the small investor (not institutional)

Very Interesting Information

This is a really interesting book on some specific approaches to value investing. It has a lot of practical information. The book is also relatively short and an entertaining listen -- well, for a book on this subject.

Interesting concept

But leaved to general. Seems more as comercial ad to the product. It never landed in the how.

Nothing now added from other Joel Greenblatt books

Simplistic and no new information from the Magic Formula or others Value ETf books. Long story short, to save you a few hours of your life: Buy a value ETF and hold to it no matter what. Keep it under your allocation, in bad and good times and lots of patience.

Missing something important...

Either I read Greenblatt's books out of order or this entire book missed the main point of why I read it... to learn how to value companies.

The book adeptly described the difficulty of being accurate in valuations of a business and offered some ways of thinking about valuing a business relative to many factors that I personally would not have thought of. The book went into very interesting detail about why the small investor has a big leg up on hamstrung Wall St. mutual fund managers just seeking to keep their day jobs. He even describes different types of indexes that you can buy and sell as ETFs and how these perform at higher levels than market cap indexes.

In the end, with all this high level understanding and real depth of knowledge on the intricacies of investing, I was still left without the basic strategy of how to go about valuing a business. Annoyingly, he kept alluding to us having or him later explaining the actual way to perform valuations, but it never came.

In the end, I'm like a first time fisherman trying to land a marlin with a 20 lb deep sea rod, 200 lb test line, the best lure money can buy, with no clue how to reel the **** thing in.