Books

I've read recently include Crusade in Europe, by Dwight Eisenhower--his account of WW2, the big one, in Europe. It contains some insights on leadership among other things, and if you are interested in military history, you'll find it worthwhile.

More directly relevant to investing is Marty Whitman's Value Investing, which I'm working on right now. Whitman, of course, is the man at Third Avenue Funds, a value shop. There are many insights in here that I haven't come across elsewhere. One of my favorites is his critique of EMH. He points out that the problem with EMH is that it assumes everyone is what he calls an "OPMI"--outside passive minority investor, his term for a non-control investor who is just buying and selling shares in a market. Now that's most of us, but it ignores the fact that there are other people, who can get something else out of the deal, what Whitman calls "SOTT" or something off the top, i.e. control investors who can give themselves salary, benefits, options, fees, etc. out of the whole thing, regardless of what the stock price is. Its more complicated than this, of course, but the basic point that its a wider world than just what the NYSE or NASDAQ quote is, I think is a very important point to ponder.