Partridge, Superinvestors

Matthew Partridge’s Superinvestors: Lessons from the Greatest Investors in History: From Jesse Livermore to Warren Buffett & Beyond (Harriman House, 2017) is a superficial book. In about 150 pages Partridge, who writes for MoneyWeek magazine in Great Britain and bases this book on a weekly column he did for the magazine in 2016, profiles and rates 20 so-called superinvestors. The idea was to look at “their strategies, performance, best investments and the lessons that ordinary investors could learn from them.”

Featured are an eclectic lot: Jesse Livermore, David Ricardo, George Soros, Michael Steinhardt, Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Anthony Bolton, Neil Woodford, Philip Fisher, T. Rowe Price, Peter Lynch, Nick Train, Georges Doriot, Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins, John Templeton, Robert W. Wilson, Edward O. Thorp, John Maynard Keynes, John ‘Jack’ Bogle, and Paul Samuelson.

For those who like to keep score, Partridge rates these investors on four metrics: “their overall performance, their longevity, their influence on other investors and investing in general, and how easy it is for ordinary investors to emulate them.” For each metric an investor could earn between one and five stars. Leading the pack, with 18 points each, are Bogle and Graham. The runners-up, with 17 points each, are Fisher and Buffett.

Partridge’s takeaways from the investing careers of these men are: (1) the market can be beaten, (2) there are many roads to investment success, (3) be flexible ..., (4) … but not too flexible, (5) successful investing requires an edge, (6) when you do have an edge, bet big, (7) have an exit strategy, (8) ordinary investors have some advantages, (9) big isn’t always beautiful, and (10) it’s good to have some distance from the crowd.