12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
An extremely helpful introduction to a wide range of topics, 2001-12-26
The book covers thirty general categories, styles or concepts in investing and then uses the following technique; first, Mr. LeBaron will introduce the subject, displaying a high level of knowledge that he has acquired through his 30+ year investing career (along with Romesh Vaitlingam). Then he introduces a guru for the particular topic, such as Warren Buffett for value investing. Then as "Counterpoint", he mentions weaknesses of the concept or technique. Most entertaining is "Guru Response", where the aforementioned guru gets to attack his critics; and finally a wrap-up called "Where Next", where Dean summarizes the topic and perhaps sometimes gets in a few digs at gurus he disagrees with.I did get the sense that Dean is on a first-name basis with all of these gurus, and it undoubtedly helped in creating a book of this type. The chapters are brief and do not need to be read sequentially, just pick the topic you are interested and run with it. Particularly helpful are the references at the end of each chapter which suggest further reading. Somewhat amusing, however, is the procedure of listing a book multiple times if it relates to multiple topics - at times the references seemed like an advertisement for Bernstein's "Capital Ideas".
Readers will learn enough to get started on a topic and perhaps for an engaging cocktail-party conversation, but to really understand something they of course will need to move on to the references, and I think that is the book's intention.
Partisans may feel that he did not cover their favored topic well enough, such as "short selling" or "technical analysis". I myself felt that the chapter on Value Investing seemed weak. Although Buffett may be the most famous current proponent of value investing, I think he may have spent too much time defending his own particular flavor of value investing, and that to get a better introduction to the topic they might have used an additional guru or two (I suppose Benjamin Graham doesn't qualify because he is dead and couldn't have written a "Guru Response" section - pity.).
Also, the topics are skewed towards big-concept, guru-think type categories such as "international money" which I suppose are entirely justified but seem more weighted towards what people are thinking about at annual retreats at Davos, Switzerland than what a middle-of-the-road investor worries about. I would like to have seen a chapter on Small Cap Stocks, perhaps with Ralph Wanger as a guru, or on a practical topic like how to avoid getting ripped off by an unscrupulous broker.
This book gave me inspirations for the next ten books I'd like to read.