Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

Let some of the best investors in the world teach you how to be on the right side of the trade.

The first edition of Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond was published in 2001. It is still in print, having sold over 100,000 copies. It has been translated into five languages. Business school professors still assign it in their courses. But in the 20 years since the first edition, the economy has changed, the investment world has evolved, and the discipline of value investing has adapted to this new environment. This second edition responds to these developments. It extends and refines an approach to investing that began with Benjamin Graham and David Dodd during the Great Depression and was adapted by Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and others to earn returns in an environment in which the opportunity to buy a stock worth a dollar for 50 cents is no longer waiting in plain sight.

The foundation of this book is the course on value investing that Bruce Greenwald taught at Columbia Business School for almost a quarter century. His aim in the course, and our aim in the book, is to help the investor operating in the Graham and Dodd tradition find him or herself on the right side of the trade. The steps include searching for the right securities, valuing them appropriately, honing a research strategy to devote time to the right activities, and wrapping it all within a risk management practice that protects the investor from permanent loss of capital.

The book has been revised throughout, but the biggest change is the addition of more than two chapters on the valuation of growth stocks, which has always been a problem for investors trained in the Graham and Dodd tradition.

Successful value investing practitioners have graced both the course and this book with presentations describing what they really do when they are at work. There are brief descriptions of their practices within, and video presentations available on the web site that accompanies this volume:

http://www.wiley.com/go/greenwald/valueinvesting2e

In addition to a selection of Warren Buffett’s letters, there are presentations by Mario Gabelli, Glenn Greenberg, Paul Hilal, Jan Hummel, Seth Klarman, Michael Price, Thomas Russo, and Andrew Weiss. Although their styles vary, they all are members in good standing of the Graham and Dodd tradition.