Graham's Intelligent Investor is easy to recommend

***I initially wrote this for another purpose. But I reprinted it here after Matt told me he has copies for the (in person) KP Investment Club members of such books as The Intelligent Investor, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, and more investing classics.***

Twice this year I’ve recommended the “Intelligent Investor” to people who have asked for suggested investing reading. Author Ben Graham taught the famous Warren Buffet and he makes investing make all the sense in the world.

The specific things I would take from this book first if I were young and just starting out include the following:

Think hard about and make sure you understand what Graham means when he contrasts investing with speculating. 

The only value I can hope to add is in the area of investing. I probably know nothing of value about speculating. Regarding investing, I focus on the notion that the money that is invested must not be needed for many years, and that we investors plan to at all costs stop ourselves from panicking and selling when things get scary. So when the money that is invested in the stock market is saved throughout your 20’s, investing it means not computing its availability to be accessed for pretty much any purposes. Any plans to reliably “flip” sums of money or double and triple it in only a few years are a strategies I know nothing about and that although Graham maybe does, he certainly doesn’t spend any time on it in the book except to caution strongly against it.

Also consider his advice to the “young doctor.” 

He says learning about investing when you have a lot of time to make mistakes with very little money at stake will train you for the decades in the future when you’ve saved enough to truly use what you’ve learned to take care of your financial self. So this book, and hopefully everything I share about investing, is every bit about the “long game” of working hard, saving, minding your fees and expenses, and taking care of your savings.

A big part of investing is understanding the fundamentals of economics and business. Equally big is understanding how we act and how that affects our investing results, what I think of as "behavioral finance." Hopefully I'll soon get to a book from that field, maybe Marshmallow Test, by Walter Mischel, or Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

I'll soon share many more details about Graham's book.

And I'll also review Burton Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street immediately afterwards before hopefully getting to the books mentioned above.