The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World’s Greatest Investors You’ve Never Heard Of and What You Can Learn From Them

The Warren Buffetts Next Door profiles previously unknown investors, with legendary performance records, who are proving every day that you don’t need to work for a hedge fund or have an Ivy League diploma to consistently beat the best performing Wall Street professionals. These amazing individuals come from all walks of life, from a globe drifting college dropout and a retired disc jockey to a computer room geek and a truck driver. Their methods vary from technical trading and global macro-economic analysis to deep value investing. The glue that holds them together is their passion for investing and their ability to efficiently harness the Internet for critical investment ideas, research, and trading skills.

Author’s Note:

In February 2000, at the peak of the bubble in dot-com stocks, I wrote a story in a special edition of Forbes magazine that had a provocative blurb on the cover posing the question: “Will the Web Produce the Next Warren Buffett?” The article chronicled several amateur investors who were riding high during that raging bull market. One of them was a 47-year-old housewife who lived on a cattle ranch in Nebraska. After seeing her family nest egg languish in the high fee mutual funds that her broker had sold her, she went online to a site called ClearStation.com and taught herself about price-earnings multiples and moving averages. Another success story was a schoolteacher from Wisconsin, and yet another was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked for the phone company by day but trolled sites like Yahoo and Briefing.com for stock ideas at night.

A little more than a month later, the dot-com bubble burst and most of the tech stocks these amateurs had big profits in came crashing down. The party was over for these bull market heroes. Or was it? There were five million online investors when I wrote that article. Today there are an estimated 50 million in the United States alone. I now think of the amateur online investors I profiled in February 2000 as merely an early wave in the gathering troops of self-directed investors. Today’s online investors are equipped with great technology and a seemingly endless armament of information, tools, and online resources.

Some have made grand predictions of how the onslaught of self-taught investors will break down the walls protecting the mighty financial institutions that have dominated the financial landscape for a century. That investors are on a mission to free themselves from the yoke of high commissions and fees and middling advice. Could be, but I think individual investor goals are a lot less ambitious.

Self-directed investors are merely looking to improve their lot in life, to be able to afford to take a family vacation each year, to buy that lakefront house, or to send their kids to a good college. They want to ensure that they will have enough income to last them through retirement. Investors are beginning to realize that devoting time toward making your money work for you is a lot smarter than working for your money. After all, the tax code, which favors long-term capital gains and dividend income, encourages this behavior.

What is clearly changing is the notion—ingrained in our psyche for generations—that only qualified financial professionals are capable of directing our investments prudently—you know, the ones with diplomas from Wharton and Harvard who illustrate their investment strategies with polished PowerPoint presentations. “Better leave it to the professionals,” is the common refrain. Unfortunately that didn’t work out so well in 2008.

This book is living proof that regular people have the ability to become outstanding investors in their own right. Sitting at home with a Web-connected computer, you can now produce the kinds of investment returns most believe are only attainable at the most sophisticated and exclusive hedge funds. The 10 “Warren Buffetts Next Door” profiled in this book can pick stocks better than the vast majority of all professional financial advisors and money managers employed by firms like Merrill Lynch and Fidelity.

Contents:

• Vagabond Value
• Options Apostle
• Lady’s Man
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• Network Miner
• Ramblin’ Jack
• The Oracle of Manitoba
• Mexican Gold
• Stock Angler
• Bear Market Hero
• Legendary Investor Incubators

The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World's Greatest Investors You've Never Heard Of and What You Can Learn From Them By Matthew Schifrin pdf