Read the classic version but found that the thoughts and standards of the time are far outdated from today's. The classic was written at a time when ticker tapes were in place, not when hundreds of billions of institutional funds move in and out of a country or industry equity sector within a week or 2. The principles are still true today as they were when they were first written, but context is what limits me from rating it a full 5!

QUICK TIPS, don't buy the 6th edition by Mc Graw Hill, buy the 2nd edition instead. The 6th edition got a lot of chapters cut out of the book for some unknown reason. I hear that The publisher decided to put those somewhere online and give you the link in an attached CD. I bought the Kindle version and no instruction on how to read those chapters. Pirating those chapters is actually faster than figure out where to download them from the publisher that I bought from, funny.

The focus of the book is on fundamental analysis, specifically, the study of quantifiable factors of securities, e.g. price, earning record, current assets, etc. The book acknowledges the significance of unquantifiable factors like strategy or macroeconomic but didn't discuss those matters in this book.

The book covers a wide range of securities types and the approach to each of them. Graham also discusses the implication behind each of the qualitative factors and how management can manipulate them to distort the truth.

It's undeniable that the lessons in this book are timeless, on the other hand, as expected, the example is quite dated, mostly centered around the railroad, public utilities, and industrial. The critical missing piece here is the service sector where inventory and amortization don't play a major role. Normally this is not an issue but I really hope to see Graham himself reasoning about the companies in the service sectors.

Overall, a wonderful book for investors of all types. If you just started, I suggest reading other writing of Graham first, like The Intelligent Investor, before starting this one.

This is a timeless classic. The principles contained in this book have stood the test of time. If you are a serious long-term investor, you have to read this. There's no getting around it. It took me more than 2 months to complete this book and I keep referring to this book from time to time.

A few things to remember from Ben Graham:

•tIntrinsic value is not a fixed number. It keeps changing.
•tFor the proper value to be determined, there must be some stability in the earnings.
•tBe careful of the stocks that not easily recognized by the market.
•tMean reversion is more common that anyone thinks.
•tChange is something that cannot be factored in, but to watch out for.
•tLook for business stability not just in the financial numbers, but also in its quality.
•tFocus on what the asset can generate and not for how much it can be sold for in future.
•tPrice is not the value, it’s your due diligence.
•tEven good stocks can be bad investments if you pay too high a price for it.
•tAlways consider recent changes in the business - are they moving it forward or pushing it backward.