|
The meat of Common Stock and Uncommon Profits is "The Fifteen Points to Look for in a Common Stock," as well as two chapters each containing five "don'ts" for investors.
The 15 points cover marketing and sales, management, r & d, profit margins, labor and personnel relations, accounting controls, industry peculiarities, communications, and fiscal outlook. In short, everything that makes a company a company.
Don't overestimate the business cycle, he suggests. It is just one of the forces pulling stock prices. The others include interest rates, regulation, inflation trends, and "new inventions and techniques as they affect old industries."
This volume also contains other Fisher writings. Each of the other parts can be read and absorbed even more quickly than Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. Part Two is the text of Conservative Investors Sleep Well, written in 1974 in the throes of a bear market. Part Three is Developing An Investment Philosophy, written as the 1970s drew to a close. This treatise includes an interesting Raychem case history which debunks, at least to the author's satisfaction, the academic theory of efficient markets.
This book is one of the excellent series of Wiley Investment Classics, all of which are eminently readable and truly deserve the appellation of "classic."
Michael Pellecchia writes about business and finance books each month He can be reached at michael_pellecchia@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
Support your