The Help

I don't read a lot of fiction, but that may soon change. Though I do prefer my continuing education to be fact-based, there's no denying that fiction has a unique ability to illustrate and communicate ideas that would otherwise be difficult to fully express. For this reason, despite my overwhelming preference for non-fiction material, some of my favourite books happen to be fiction, including Animal Farm and The Goal. I hold Kathryn Stockett's The Help in similarly high esteem.

Value Fail: Aeropostale

A few years ago, I brought up Aeropostale as a potential value investment. There was a time this company could do no wrong. Times have changed.

Value Investors by Chan

We hear a lot about the most famous value investors. But there is a group of very successful value managers who fly under the radar, many of whom are profiled in Ronald Chan's Value Investors.

Capital Cities

Tom Murphy started out managing a tv station after graduating from Harvard Business School. Over the ensuing decades, he would come to run/own the media company Capital Cities, which bought ABC and eventually sold itself to Disney, earning shareholders who hung in there from the start 10,000 times (not a typo!) their original investment. Here is a terrific interview transcript where he talks about what allowed him to be successful:

Naked Statistics

If all statistics text books were as entertaining as Charles Wheelan's Naked Statistics, I don't think statistics would be considered a boring subject.

More Than You Know

I very much enjoyed Michael Mauboussin's book The Success Equation a few months ago, so when a reader recommended another of his books, More Than You Know, I was happy to give it a try.

IBI Group Plummets Some More

A few weeks ago, I discussed IBI Group's debt as a potentially attractive risk/reward. Unfortunately, the company has since issued a very ugly quarterly report that has resulted in IBI's debentures falling to less than 40 cents on the dollar.Read more...