"Security Analysis" by Benjamin Graham

Last time when i went to Landmark - my favorite destination, next only to Higginbothams, i saw this book " Security Analysis". just then i have completed my shopping of books for a couple of thousands and exceeded my budget for the whole of current year. My friend Sankar writes from US :

Graham and Dodd need no introduction to the practitioners of value investing. The Sixth Edition of their book, Security Analysis, coinciding with its 75th anniversary, was released sometime this month. The central theme of the book is as relevant today as it was, 75 years back.

This book has commentaries by some of the well known persons in the Value Investing universe. Warren Buffett has written the foreword. He has read this book four times...

I had a chance to gloss over some of the chapters, just out of curiosity as a past student of Management. Bruce Greenwald, a Columbia University Professor (where Graham and Dodd taught value investing) has written commentary for the chapters on Balance Sheet Analysis, titled "Deconstructing the Balance Sheet". This is short, crisp and laden with insight. He has mentioned why it is not possible to find the value investing picks like the way Buffett and Ben Graham found several decades back.

Unofficial biography of Warren Buffett by Roger Lowenstein are filled with examples on how these gurus found companies traded far below their true value. Buffett and Ben Graham played the role of shareholder activists in a different way - strongly persuading managements to unlock hidden assets.

In those days it was not uncommon to see dividends amounting to 150% of the quoted price (note - quoted price, not the par value of share) after sale of idle assets. Bruce Greenwald has mentioned this is not the case any longer. True. And he has explained the reasons. The commentary ends with a case study on WorldComm, clinical analysis of key balance sheet data and how it violated the basic tenets of value investing.

The most recent version of Intelligent Investor - a popular version of the value investing principles authored by Ben Graham also has commentaries written by Jason Zweig, with present day examples.

BTW, i am still contemplating .... the price of the book is ... guess ... Rs. 2,670.00 .... my wife will not allow me to enter the house ..... the reason being not only the price but also the space constraint ----my small library with more than 1000 books ( Excluding another 1,000 plus books in Tamil ) .... probably i should look at shifting back to my native place. .. . our old house in chettinad has a built up area of about 25,000 square feet ! i should thank my great grand dad who foresaw this and built it 110 years back ! ... or electronic E- Books may be a solution ?