By Adam Jusko, ProudMoney.com, adam@proudmoney.com
Every day there are thousands (maybe millions) of words churned out online about how to do better financially, ranging from macro-level advice on planning for long-term financial comfort, to micro-level advice on what a stock’s chart foretells about the stock’s near-term performance. While no one has all the answers, many of those words being churned out have none of the answers. What you need is information from people that actually have a track record of success.
A book like The Best Investment Writing gives you a place to start. Edited by Meb Faber, it is an anthology of thoughts from some of the more successful minds in the world of finance today. While you could go online and find all of the individual essays collected here, what you are getting by buying the book is a curated collection that saves you the time of sifting through the muck to find the good stuff. The book can be enjoyed by both the newbie and the financial pro, but for me the book’s value is maybe more as a jumping-off point, showing me which blogs I should be reading and whose Twitter accounts I should be following. Among the authors in this volume that you might already know: Jason Zweig, Barry Ritholtz, Ken Fisher, Aswath Damodaran, Josh Brown, Michael Kitces, Charlie Bilello, and Faber himself.
While I respect the acumen of all these men (unfortunately no women represented here), I won’t be following all of them. Like any anthology, there are going to be essays that fit your interests and aims, while others miss the mark. For me, the more general personal finance and investment philosophy essays are the ticket, while I have less interest in getting into the technical aspects of CAPE, Sharpe ratio, etc. Depending on your level of knowledge, you may be just the opposite in terms of which essays light your fire.
In the same way, some of these essays are very much of the present time, discussing specifics of the financial environment today and how the current situation may play out. Other essays are timeless due to their focus on how to think about finance & investing in general. However, while some of these essays will become dated (and some may already be), finance is cyclical. Most conditions will be seen again, even if they don’t match today’s world, so there is still something to be learned.
Note that Meb Faber is donating his royalties from the book to charity, another reason for you to feel good about buying.