The Sleuth Investor: Uncover the Best Stocks Before They Make Their Move

by Avner Mandelman

To make real money in the stock market you have to act like a sleuth.

It's not enough to rely on SEC files, annual reports, and press releases. To uncover the most lucrative investments, you must dig beneath the printed surface of public information and sleuth for physical evidence. This is the only way to reveal the actual truth about a company's real value-and its future.

Investing expert Avner Mandelman honed this highly...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071481850
• ISBN13: 9780071481854
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly original- A breath of fresh air!

When I picked this book up, I judged by the cover, I'll be honest. I didn't think it would be a serious book on investing... I was planning on just leafing through it quickly and get on to "more important" books on technical analysis. But what a surprise when I realized that this was a COMPLETELY REVOLUTIONARY guidebook for taking responsibility for investment decisions. Mr. Mandelman, THANK YOU for writing what you wrote and taking the stand you take against conventional market theory. I have had the ideas of "the sleuth investor" running around my mind for years, and now I finally found a book that details how to do it! Absolutely brilliant- thanks for the stories. I am SO ENCOURAGED to do the hard-work, time-intensive, creativity-required investing that I have always wanted to do after reading your book. It gets very dismal when everyone around you is saying "just buy and hold," or my trader pals who always say "just stick to the charts." Having successful guys like you out there proving that there is strong reason to be looking beyond publically-available data is a BREATH OF FRESH AIR. Thank you! I'm already making a list of stocks that I want to look into more, and I'll be calling the government offices to see if there are any companies in my hometown to start investigating. Here I am- at 24 years old and already learning the basic strategies of a money manager. What an exciting place to be and learn.

Great book for professional investors

The Sleuth Investor is an excellent book for any professional investor focused on picking individual stocks. Even if you've been researching stocks for your entire life, there are techniques and tactics you will learn in this book. Highly Recommended

Mandelman Gets It

I just finished The Sleuth Investor and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've been waiting for years for someone to write a book like this, and I'm glad Avner Mandelman wrote it since he obviously gets it. I worked as a journalist in Silicon Valley for 13 years, and I learned early in my career that the only way to get valuable, exclusive information was by getting out of the office and doing things like counting delivery trucks and tailing investment bankers. Even though I have some sleuthing experience, this book taught me new techniques. More importantly, it deepened my understanding of the sleuth philosophy, which values exclusive firsthand evidence over commodity data on a screen. The book is accessible to beginners, too. I would especially recommend it to students who are learning mathematical finance for the first time. You probably won't learn the ideas and skills in this book from your professors.

The part that Benjamin Graham started to tell us, but left out

This is a unique book. It explains how to determine competitive advantage from a gumshoe point of view. If you believe the little squiggly lines on your Excel spreadsheet and love to push numbers around in your sandbox, you may be insulted by some of the techniques presented. The book reminded me of the fictional philosophical debate about how many teeth were in a horse's mouth. The deductive practitioners debated it for hours, so the inductive practitioners sent their opponents into shock when they actually went and counted the teeth in the horses mouth, starting the great war and symbiotic relationship between deductive and inductive reasoning. This author describes a framework and methodology to sense changes in a companies fortunes before those changes are known and thus reflected in the value of the company and its stock's price. Some of the techniques will appear unsavory. Some might even be questionable. This book should be used by students of finance (security analysis primarily) and entrepreneurial studies. The book is fun and interesting to read. Most readers will probably not spend the effort to follow its recommendations, choosing instead to save the energy required in reaching over and picking up the phone and calling customers, suppliers and contacts within the industry. Highly recommended.

A soon to be investment classic.

This is a book which every serious investor must acquire. A book which can help level the field between the large institutional investor, with all the attendant advantages, and the small investor like me. While the Confused Capitalist owns some 25+ investment books, including classics such as "Security Analysis", "One Up On Wall Street", and "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits", I have to say that I think this book will prove to be the most personally enriching. I could just tell right from the cover that this book, The Sleuth Investor, was going to be different from almost every investment book I've every read. Instead of a picture of Bulls or Bears, The Author, Dollars Floating in the Sky, or a Stock Exchange Building, instead there's a picture of what appears to be a private detective or, perhaps, a field operative. As I surmised from the cover, the book didn't disappoint. And the dust cover picture cuts to the heart of the difference between this book and all the other investments books I've read. The difference between receiving second hand, "academic" information of stocks (eg annual and quarterly reports, etc.) or gathering that publicly available information, PLUS quality information directly from the field. The author, Avner Mandelman, president and CEO of investment firm Giraffe Capital, tells you exactly how to sleuth out investment opportunities "in the field". He gives direct examples of what, who, how and when. This is not a book full of numbers and ratios; Mr. Mandelman knows full well that the investment world is full of these, yet the number of investors able to outperform the market is very few indeed. In this book, he shows you how to both lower your investment risk profile, all the while increasing your odds of batting not just one, but numerous, investment home runs. While some investing books, such as Ken Fisher's "The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don't" state the importance of acquiring exclusive or near exclusive information, his book doesn't actually show you how to achieve that, since it only provides some further academic tools to suggest whether you might know something others might not know. On the other hand, if you apply Mr. Mandelman's suggested techniques, you'll know when you know something others don't when you are finished "sleuthing" a stock story. I certainly haven't read any like it before, although there's hints of "One Up On Wall Street", by Peter Lynch here and there, and some visible heritage to "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits", by Phillip A. Fisher. There's also some obvious lineage to Warren Buffett's ideas as well. The book is a great read as well; it was the first investment book I've read since "On Up On Wall Street" by Peter Lynch that I when read it in bed, it was because it was so interesting, rather than because I intended as use it as a non-prescription sleep aid. Canadian readers who've followed the business community here for a dozen years or s