Finished reading a new book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Dan Pink (whose previous book - A Whole New Mind I liked a lot).
This book is unique because it is made entirely of manga style cartoons and it has clear and simple career advice. Instead of listing down the key ideas, I will just embed a presentation by Garr which does a much better job of presenting the ideas (in the same manga style no less!)
Finished the following books:
Great book on investing! Very easy to read and short too! Joel Greenblatt describes a "magic formula" to rank stocks (based on two criteria: Return on Assets and Earnings yield (reverse of P/E!), rank stocks with higher numbers for both. Add the two ranks and rerank based on sum of the two ranks). Then buy a basket of 20-30 stocks who are top ranked and hold them for 1 year. Sell them all after 1 year, re-apply the formula and buy new stocks with highest rankings. Rinse and Repeat. Based on backtesting with different ways, this portfolio has handily beaten the market averages. I wonder why backtesting was only done for past 13 years when comprehensive US market data is available for 75+ years.
The strategy seems sound and is well supported by theory. (High ROA companies means, good earnings on slim assets. High Earnings yield means they are currently cheap. Using the book's website you can very easily find the rankings and stocks that you need. The only problem I see with this strategy is implementation. Buying and selling 30 stocks every year (60 transactions) is not cheap (okay, I am an index fund person - 0.19% fund expenses). I could possibly use buyandhold.com or foliofn.com, but they are not cheap. Also the author might turn the website into a paysite (so you have to use something like moneycentral.com to screen your stocks. I will make a couple of mock portfolios to keep watching the strategy for sure.
I guess I am not a Malcom Gladwell person! This book was on my to-read list for a long time and though I liked the basic premise of the book, somehow I was disappointed by the presentation. I had the exact same reaction after I finished Blink. Anyway...
One fictional:
The other factual:
Haven't been updating the blog recently... Here are some books I read in the last few weeks...
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - about creating a burning desire to achieve success and generating ideas.
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown - I was fascinated by earlier two books by Dan Brown - Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code and this one deals with topics that are dearer to me - Security, Encryption, NSA. But I did not find it as gripping as the first two. I was particularly turned off by the concepts (e.g. mutation strings) that the author tries to create for the story to advance, such things just turn the brain off. (That makes me think that maybe I enjoyed the first two books because I do not have any knowledge about the topics of Pope, Illuminati, Christian history)
Deception Point - by Dan Brown. This was even more boring about a new discovery by NASA, the politics, cover-ups, yawn...
From Personality Dev books to pure fiction: These were too difficult to resist:
Angels and Demons
and 
The Da Vinci Code. I really liked the way the story is told. I wonder why any author cannot create such novels based on Indian Mythologies, Ramayan, Mahabharat ? Telling the story of someone trying to find out the Ashwatthama's gem by getting clues from Bhagwadgeeta ?