Investors adopt many different approaches that offer little or no
real prospect of long-term success and considerable chance of
substantial economic loss. Many are not coherent investment
programs at all but instead resemble speculation or outright
gambling. Investors are frequently lured by the prospect of
quick and easy gain and fall victim to the many fads of Wall
Street. My goals in writing this book are twofold. In the first
section I identify many of the pitfalls that face investors. By
highlighting where so many go wrong, I hope to help investors
learn to avoid these losing strategies.
For the remainder of the book I recommend one particular
path for investors to follow-a value-investment philosophy.
Value investing, the strategy of investing in securities trading at
an appreciable discount from underlying value, has a long history
of delivering excellent investment results with very limited
downside risk. This book explains the philosophy of value
investing and, perhaps more importantly, the logic behind it in
an attempt to demonstrate why it succeeds while other
approaches fail.