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Common Stocks And Uncommon Profits is one of the classics. First written in 1957, Fisher takes you through key strategies for selecting stocks as a value investor. The same style of investing used by Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful investor to have ever lived. Buffet himself has spoken positively about Fisher’s writings and investing strategies.

I rated this book highly for advanced investors, purely for his exceptional knowledge and experience. Fisher also speaks of his analysis as if he were looking at the business rather a stock. He focuses on how well it is run and managed rather than the numbers it produces. 

Although, at times his qualitative approach to stock analysis makes the book very wordy and a difficult and tedious read at times, I highly recommend a more experienced investor to read this. It will greatly improve your perspective that investing is more than just looking at the numbers. Many other books touch on this subject but never go into this much depth about how a company is run.

Newer investors may find this a difficult read. However, it covers an important concept about looking at a business, so I encourage you to brave the read if you dare…

15 Reasons to buy a stock:

The most useful section of the book was his 15 points to look for in a stock. Fisher goes into great detail, his own selection process for picking out brilliant stocks. Many points which I often forget to consider when choosing my own investment. Looking deep into areas of the running of a business that many will miss. Fisher wouldn’t consider investing in a particular stock unless he was sure the company was sound in all of these 15 areas.

This section is followed up by an equally useful ‘Do and Don’t’ section for successful investing. Here he outlines 10 lessons that all investors need to learn in order to avoid huge money losing mistakes down the line. Lessons include: warnings about trying to time the market, following the crowd and keeping your cool in the stock market.

Great lessons to be learned:

Not only does Fisher have a detailed outline of how he chooses winning stocks, this book is also useful for the frequent snippets of gold in terms of investment knowledge. Great tips I picked up were:

• It’s useful to get the opinions of other investors and if possible ex-employees of the company you are analysing. This can give you a more in depth experience of what this company is about and where they are heading.

• Faster growing healthy companies are sometimes worth paying a slightly higher price for. As high future profits justify the higher price.

• Don’t become obsessed with the exact price of a stock to buy. If a great company stock is unusually cheap, buy it. Waiting for it to drop a little more may be in vain as it may not reach these levels ever again.

• If you buy a great stock at a cheap price but it goes lower, buy more and you and average the overall cost down.

• Patience. This is probably the most important trait of any value investor. You must be patient to override the short-term volatility of the stock market in order to capitalize on long-term gains.

You will find there also are many more gems of investing information whilst reading this book!!

Money Your Concern Rating:

Although first written over 60 years ago, ‘Common stocks and uncommon profits’ is still highly regarded as one of the pioneering books on the modern value investing strategy. The 15 stock analysis tips certainly step you into a whole new way of looking at companies. You’ll see them as a business rather than some numbers on a sheet. This is a perspective which all investors should come to grips with, old and new alike.

Advanced Investor Rating: 8/10

Beginner Rating: 4/10

If you are keen to gain a new investing perspective and uncover the lessons from this book, You can find it here…

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Thanks for reading. If you found the review helpful, i’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. Don’t forget to also check out the Investing section of our website to further progress your investing knowledge.

Harry