Contrarian Investing: Discover How to Buy and Sell When Other Won't, and Make Money Doing It

This book is a contrarian investor's ultimate guide. Written by a portfolio manager and business reporter who know their stuff, this is advice to take to heart. Whether a beginner or highly experienced investor, everyone can learn something valuable from this tremendous resource. It is also an excellent introduction to anyone interested in the concept of contrarian investing. All aspects are covered including a history of market manias, factors which drive the markets, an individual investor psychological evaluation and a series of formulas in order to calculate what stocks might be ideal contrarian plays. This book belongs on every investor's bookshelf, especially anyone seeking to make profits from "the crowd's" mistakes. It deserves 100 stars.

This book should click with value investors. Gallea and Patalon provide practical technical and fundamental strategies to beat the market (with little downside risk) as a contrarian investor. In today's frothy market, the principles gained in this book will help you screen for stocks with major upside potential.

I found this book to be well written and a great primer on contrarian investing for people who want to manage their own investments. Contrarian strategies are least popular during stock market manias but such periods are also the best time to invest in value instead of hype and hoopla. Overall this is a great book for investors with independant minds and the courage to go against the crowd.

I think "Contrarian Investing" is an excellent book for today's investors. Given the current environment, which is the 18th year of the bull market (1982-), too little is mentioned about risk management. Many of todays investors look merely at the short term and the possibility of the quick easy gain. This book tries to focus on how to protect your portfolio with some easy rules to follow. These rules may not suit everyone, but they provide some good guidelines and rules of thumb to follow. My experience as a financial planner is that very few people have any kind of plan for their stock let alone broad financial plans. The tools that are given by the authors, if used correctly, should provide the investor with the downside protection that is needed in todays market. After reading the book, I found myself looking at my portfolio and making adjustments to reduce my own risk level. The authors do a good job in discussing the consequences of too much risk. Overall, I thought the book was exceptionally well-written in that Mr. Gallea and Mr. Patalon took a technical topic like investing and made it easy to read and comprehend. Even though I am not one, I think even a novice investor could understand this book and learn a great deal from it.

As a professional money manager, I must highly recommend this work. It presents academic arguments that favor "value investing" over the current momentum strategies that are now in vogue. Many of my own investment secrets are contained in this book. For those investors that embrace the value concept, please see other classic novels from E.Lefevre, B.Graham, K.Fisher, and B.Malkiel.