Quality Investing: Owning the best companies for the long term Hardcover – January 5, 2016

Shockingly good.Another reviewer complains that there's no "framework" here. Thank God. Look, in some fields no matter how far you progress there's another framework - solid, concise, complex, interlocking body of knowledge - to be learned. Classical mechanics > electromagnetics > quantum, etc.More commonly in other fields there's some basic useful framework everyone should learn right away, but once that's mastered progress is all about filling your head with and deeply internalizing a huge number of relatively simple facts, stories, and patterns. (Of course academics and their imitators do not accept this reality and pretend instead that the structure of knowledge in micro, macro, or psych - don't even get me started on biases/heuristics popularizations - can be reduced to a series of neat interlocking frameworks.)Anyhow this book is packed dense with these useful chunks, and the more you've got stored away the more likely a light bulb of familiarity flickers in your head when you crack open a new 10-K.For example, there's this company called Clearone that I've followed awhile that makes puzzlingly high gross margins considering what they do - video conferencing equipment. But it clicked when I read this book's chapter on how friendly middlemen can create unusually strong businesses, i.e. optometrists always recommending a particular brand of high quality glasses because he cares not at all about price.Clearone sells to a friendly non-price sensitive middleman - big system integrators that do large scale technology installments for universities, corporations, hospitals, etc.Anyhow, the book is great, dense, legitimately useful, and minimally redundant with other investing books because it skips the usual routine of either romanticizing basic value investing concepts or trying to force fit some artificial framework on the tangled mess of knowledge that is useful to investing.

Best for quality analysis most read book

The book was well written with plenty of examples. The book could have been a little deeper, but is good when taken at a high level.

So very well written and truthful!.Thank you very much for all the examples and for cutting to the chase along all the book.Loved it!!!

If you are looking to understand how certain businesses do better, maybe much better, than others then this is the book to read. Ideally a company has a growing end market, but it is as important that they have the right go to market strategy.

Quality investing is something Terry Smith has made mainstream recently. This book provides a framework and understanding of what makes certain companies better than others.

It is a very good book on investing in quality companies. Investing is very difficult and there are so many exceptions to rules so there needs to breadth. Unfortunately, the only problem with the book is there is too much breadth and it is difficult to take away a framework that can be used for analyzing companies. It is a very good book that should be read and re-read. It is just written in a way that seems to have no linear path or a structure that can be used in analyzing companies.If you are interested in a framework for investing in quality companies must reads ahead of Quality Investing are Michael Mauboussin's Measuring a Moat Essay, Bruce Greenwald's Competition Demystified, Professor J.Carlos Jarillo's Strategic Logic, and Joan Magretta's Understanding Michael Porter.

We are trying to get into investments so my husband and I got this book. It is an easy read and very informative. We learned a lot.