Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth from the World's Best Money Managers

Like his previous book Investment Gurus, Investment Visionaries is another great series of interviews with money managers and pioneers. While the methodologies of venture capitalists and technology investors are more difficult to distill and systematize than the value and growth investors that Tanous profiled in his last book, there is value nonetheless in this book, particularly in the interviews with Don Valentine, William Haseltine and Gregg Powers. Valentine shares and expands on his well-known preference for defined markets over talented entrepreneurial managers, Haseltine describes the genesis of Humane Genome Sciences' innovative drug development platform, and Powers reveals a wonderfully simple and useful way to search for value in annuity business models within the technology sector. Most imporantly, Tanous is a great interviewer and listener, and he draws out great insights from his subjects without making himself the center of the interviews. Based on his interviews with Gregg Powers in this book and Bruce Sherman in his previous book, I would urge Mr. Tanous to consider writing his next book exclusively about their investment firm, Private Capital Management.

I read this book on the recommendation of a broker. I thought I would just read one or two interviews that interested me (I was particularly interested in developments in new medical procedures) but once I started, I read them all! The author's interviewing style is so easy and non-confrontational that I suspect his subjects lowered their guard and told more than they probably intended to. I found the subject matter fascinating. Here is a living history of some of the greatest investment decisions of all time told by the people who made those decisions. The venture capitalists the author interviewed on Sand Hill Road in California were particularly fascinating to me as they talked about their decisions to invest in legendary companies like Apple and Intel. That led me to wonder what these people like today that I can invest in! Fortunately, the author asks most of the visionaries for ideas and stocks they like now. He lists them all in an appendix while hammering home the point (and he does it a bit too much) that we should remember that these are risky stocks and we shouldn't go overboard. Overall, I found this book fascinating from an historical point of view, and useful in pointing the way new technologies will help us in the near future and maybe make us some money!

Tanous's effort is far superior to the other collections of interviews with money managers. Most books of this sub-genre fall into two categories, depending on the author. The first type of author is usually a journalist who knows little about the disciplines of stock picking and running investment funds, and you are usually hard pressed to find any new insight in their books, because they don't know how to ask their subjects the really insightful questions. The second type, which I'll call the John Train style, has a sophisticated investor/fund consultant doing the interviews, and can often produce real insight from the interviewees. The problem with many of these books, and Train's in particular, is that the author is often not trying to interview the successful money managers. Instead, authors like Train are often trying to play gotcha! with their interviewees, subjecting them to asinine questions and frequently diverging from the topics that made you buy their book in the first place. The Money Masters by Train is so full of political tangents and Train's forcing his opinion on the likes of Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett that I've wanted to scream at him at some points.In contrast, Tanous knows how to ask questions that are of interest to professional and serious amateur investors, and he knows how to stay on topic. He does ask every interviewee about the efficient market hypothesis, but that's a theme of his book and can be excused. What you get from Tanous is an interviewer who knows how to ask really penetrating, really revealing questions of the world's best money managers, and the humility to realize that his readers don't want to know what he, Tanous, thinks, but what his interviewees think! What's more, he managed to get interviews with at least two money managers--Bruce Sherman of Private Capital Management and Scott Sterling Johnston of Sterling Johnston Asset Management--that have excellent track records but who speak very, very rarely to the press. There is real value to Tanous's book, and I'm a better investor for having read it. Serious investors should still read Train's books for their revealing interviews with Buffett, Templeton, Lynch and others, but in Tanous's book, you have all the strengths of the Train books without any of the that author's obvious, glaring shortcomings as a writer and interviewer.

Peter Tanous features interviews with 18 individuals he identifies as top, common stock investment consultants - or "gurus." His choices are based on his work as a consultant identifying investment advisers for corporations. The consultants he selected for this book represent the major stock investing approaches as growth, value or momentum investors. The interview format lets them speak for themselves. He briefly introduces the book with a primer on basic investment terms and principles, and a summary of major themes. We at getAbstract find the range of views shown very helpful, but note that the book suffers from overwriting and a lack of focus and editing. Some tightening would help highlight the main points in the long interviews. The introduction and conclusion are long and general, and a clearer, more detailed summary would be very welcome. Yet, the book offers a lot of information for the average serious investor, much of it straight from the mouths of some very important horses.

Pete Tanous made a real effort to make this book so that almost anyone could read and understand it. He simplified complex ideas. He asked all the "gurus" the same questions. He tried to find out what the average investor could learn from these experts and in a summary he puts together what he learned. If you want to learn how to invest better, then this book should help.