Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week!

Do you want to be a long-term investor?If so, this is the book to read. I feel like I get it, but it takes ongoing effort to find stock picks that will work. And by "work" I mean giving 15% annual returns for the next 10 years (or doubling twice).Forget the 15 minutes per week. It takes more effort than that.The biggest obstacle is understanding the system and then finding the numbers. The author explains it well. But you will have to figure out how to get the information you need. I found it, but only after lots of looking. Your web research skills will pay off here. And you will likely use his website calculator to do the math on the Margin of Safety, but he offers it for free.Here is what it takes.I spent several days learning the system of finding great companies. This took me 50-100 hours of finding the right websites and getting it down to a simple research system that worked for me, mostly based on the book.Now I research individual companies for about an hour and put their stats on a notecard. This INCLUDES the actual price I want to pay for the stock.But you will have to research 100 companies to find 10-15 great companies.The prices will be way too high, except for one or two companies. Invest in those. You only need one or two or three investments like this per year.Repeat the research process until you find more great companies.Besides teaching the system itself, the book's strength is in showing you what to look for right away before wasting a lot of time researching a company. So if it doesn't fit this initial criterion, I move on immediately. So I don't have to waste an hour on research for that company.It takes time, especially in your learning phase, but it is time well spent.

I ordered this book sight unseen from Amazon because of the advanced reviews. If I had seen it first, I *might* not have bought it. But I'm still glad I have it anway.What I really like about this book is that it explains key financial figures for calculating the future worth of a company and for deciding what a good price would be to pay for the company today (in terms of the paid stock price.) This aspect of the book is invaluable and is easily worth the cost of the book.What I don't like about the book is the presumption that you can just sit down, at any given time, and with a little research, quickly find a company that's on fire sale and that will safely reap 15% a year or more, for many years out. It takes special circumstances to find companies in such positions. One of the author's inspirations, Warren Buffet, has not found many such opportunities for years now, which is why he is sitting on 46Billion in cash. He can't find anything to buy that's cheap enough and that would meet the author's criteria!So the author is disingenuous in suggesting that you, after reading the book, and putting in a few minutes a week looking at web sites, can discover a gem that the greats like Buffet haven't been able to find. Bargains like this don't come along everyday. But they do come along over time.And that's why I ended up really liking this book. The author's instructions on how to find such gems thrown into the trash by the market, when such situations occur, is the clearest, best, and simplest description I've come across (and I have no less that 3 sagging shelves of investment books.) I'm going to use the information the author gave so that, when the market tanks, say, I can pick up some of the great companies he describes and KNOW, because of his formulas, that I'm buying a jewel at a bargain basement price. I'd been looking for that information for some time, thus, in the final analysis, I really do value this book.

I was made aware of this book by the YouTube channel NewMoney. The approach seems to be consistent with the best value investors that I follow (Buffet, Munger, Lynch, Pobrai, Dalio, et. al.) . Listening to them will help you to understand why Phil's approach makes real sense and something that is not like many of the other over-hyped approaches you hear about promising to change your life in no time for no effort at no risk.If you can use a spreadsheet to analyze stocks, this will help identify where to get the numbers, how to use those numbers to determine the intrinsic value of the stock, and provide some advice on when to buy and sell as a function of the price relative to the intrinsic value you compute. The specific methods and tools referenced in the book will make that process totally clear.My only complaint is that a lot of time is spent providing approximate methods to determine the intrinsic value by making rough calculations in your head. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just that a lot of pages were spent on that part of it. If you use a simple spreadsheet and a few simple formulae, all the effort to understand the simple mental approach is just a waste.To be fair, the concepts described for gathering the data and computing the intrinsic value are very simple and limiting the book to that alone would have produced a smaller book that might have reduced its apparent value. That does not detract from its value, it only increases the cost of getting the core of the information.On balance, this is a very good book providing a solid basis for building a portfolio of stock that appears to be in complete agreement with solid investment practice. It is also likely to be a very good introduction to someone getting started with investing. Buy it, read it, check it out by paying attention to the best and slowest investors on the planet and you won't go far wrong.