Excess Returns

Vanhaverbeke assembled this as a synthesis of what successful investors have written and said about their methods, drawing on a very large number of sources and organising the material into a structured account.

The method is compilation and comparison rather than original argument. He reads across Graham, Buffett, Munger, Lynch, Templeton, Klarman, Greenblatt, Marks, Fisher, Neff, Miller, Whitman and many others, identifies where they agree and where they differ, and organises the result around the stages of the investment process: developing the right mindset and temperament, generating ideas and screening, analysing a business, valuing it, deciding when to buy, constructing a portfolio, and deciding when to sell.

The comparative approach produces the book's value. On most questions the successful investors he surveys agree: that investing means buying part of a business, that price and value are different, that a margin of safety is required, that temperament matters more than intelligence, that most activity destroys returns, and that understanding what you own is a constraint on where you can operate. On other questions they disagree sharply, including concentration versus diversification, whether to hold cash, the use of macroeconomic analysis, the definition of value, and when to sell, and Vanhaverbeke sets the positions against each other rather than resolving them.

The book is very long, densely referenced and reads as a reference rather than as a narrative. It has no original insight and does not claim any. Its use is as an organised index into the primary literature, since every claim is attributed and a reader can go to the source. Readers who have already read the principals will find it repetitive.