What's the difference between an investor and a speculator? Well an investor is just someone who got their speculation wrong! I suspect that there's more than a grain of truth to this joke and I've certainly fallen into the trap of turning a short-term position into a long-term one in the past; all in the name of experience though and don't tell my wife!
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham for Christmas one year and I still haven't managed to finish it. It's a demanding read and with almost 90,000 books listed on Amazon under Accounting and Finance I'm spoilt for choice. In fact Amazon is where I stumbled across The Investor's Guide to Understanding Accounts and this is a far easier proposition.
Robert Leach, aims to cover both the calculation and interpretation of key business metrics that are relevant to investors. In doing this he focuses on ten primary questions that anyone should ask of a company, before becoming a shareholder, and then rounds out the book by suggesting a few ways in which accounts can be (quite legally) manipulated.
I've gone through these questions in my blog and worked through some of his ideas in practice with NEXT and Majestic Wine as subjects. Personally I've learnt a lot from this process and the book will likely always remain close at hand in future.
Anyway further details can be found here: http://www.damiancannon.com/blog/the-investors-guide-to-understanding-accounts/
