Profiles of the great money managers and their differing methods.
John Train profiles investors he considers exceptional, updating and extending his earlier books The Money Masters and The New Money Masters. Each chapter covers one investor's background, method and characteristic holdings, based on interviews and on published records.
The subjects include Warren Buffett, George Soros, John Templeton, Benjamin Graham, Philip Fisher, Peter Lynch, T. Rowe Price, Michael Steinhardt, Ralph Wanger, Julian Robertson, Mark Lightbown, Paul Cabot, John Neff, Richard Rainwater and others. Train's method is to identify what each does that is distinctive rather than to extract a common formula, and the book's usefulness comes from the contrasts. Graham buys statistical cheapness and diversifies; Fisher buys quality and concentrates; Soros trades reflexive feedback between perception and fundamentals; Templeton searches internationally for the cheapest markets; Steinhardt takes contrary macro positions with high turnover.
Train writes as an experienced money manager and the profiles are informed, but the book has the survivorship problem of every collection of this kind: it profiles people whose methods worked over the period selected. It also stops in 2000, so the subsequent records of several subjects are missing, including Robertson's fund closure in that year. The chapters on Graham, Fisher and Price are the most useful as statements of investment philosophy, and Train's summaries of each method are unusually precise.
Investors surveying different approaches who want precise summaries of what distinguishes the major schools rather than a synthesis of them.
American investment adviser who founded Train, Smith Counsel and wrote profiles of the era's leading money managers.
The Money Masters profiled Buffett, Graham, Templeton and Price while several were still working, setting out each manager's method in a few pages and establishing the format every later investor-profile book uses. Famous Financial Fiascos covers the reverse case, running through manias and frauds from the tulip trade onward.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.