Core Investing, Research and Related Resources

This page collects some core resources to help you make progress on the foundations. These include some favorite investing, business, and other books the MITIMCo team recommends; some resources to learn the basics of finance, investing, and research; tools to begin researching and analyzing companies; investment write up and deep dive examples, and some other miscellany.

Read a lot, but make sure you pause to absorb, reflect, write, and discuss with friends! Ask why, and write down a list of questions or things you want to understand. 

Keep in mind also, the investing books below convey some important principles and ideas, but the world has changed a lot since some of them were written (as two important examples, the pace and role of technological disruption has increased, and the entire investment industry has become much more crowded and competitive), which is worth bearing in mind. The changing world is part of what makes investing challenging, and interesting! Regardless, we can learn a lot from these books if we read them with the right perspective.

Investing Classics

• The Essays of Warren Buffett by Lawrence Cunningham
• The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein
• The Outsiders by Will Thorndike
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Phil Fisher
• The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham
• 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
• The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt

Business Books

• Built from Scratch by Arthur Blank and Bernard Marcus
• Built to Last by Jim Collins
• The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig
• Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
• Understanding Porter by Joan Magratta
• Good to Great to Gone by Alan Wurtzel

Other Great Foundational Reads

• Why Stocks Go Up And Down by William Pike - highly recommended for a very accessible introduction to core accounting and finance concepts. Billed as "the book you need to understand other investment books."
• Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
• The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
• The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
• Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
• Wooden by John Wooden
• Different by Youngme Moon
• Working by Roberto Caro
• Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (For a long deep dive on behavioral investing - there are other shorter books to get the basic concepts, like the James Montier Little Book of Behavioral Investing)

Basics of Finance/Investing/Valuation theory and practice

NYU Stern Professor Aswath Damodaran has open-sourced a huge amount of material from the classes he teaches on introductory investing, finance, and valuation. You can find them at the links below. Some of the classes can be taken for certificate credit, for fee; others are completely free. 

• Professor Damodaran has a blog post where he recommends how to sequence his online classes. Take a look at that first. There is a helpful flow chart in the section under sequencing.
• Aswath Damodoran classes homepage

Learn from business titans

Founders Podcast - every week host David Senra reads a biography of a great entrepreneur, businessperson, or historical figure and walks you through his key takeaways. It's an awesome, fast way to learn from the titans of history. (Don't let this stop you reading some full-length biographies too!)

Company data

After you've gotten the basic ideas of investing down, you'll definitely want to start getting your hands dirty learning about and analyzing specific companies. Here are some free or inexpensive resources to help you start out doing that. The basic tools are company financial data, company filings and transcripts, company news, and second-hand research reports on companies. Maybe even start a substack to start cataloging what you learn and get your ideas, reports, and write-ups out there for feedback!

• Koyfin or Tikr for basic financial data. Paid accounts allow you to download data to excel and access company earnings call transcriptions. I've never used either so let me know what you think of them.
• Quartr app to listen to company conference calls for free on your phone
• 10Kreader / Stratosphere.io for more company-level research.
• Wisesheets (https://wisesheets.io/) to pull data and stock prices into Excel.

Of course, there is no substitute for going straight to the source and reading annual report filings (called 10-Ks) and other company filings. These are available on https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/.

Here is a great list of additional free/cheap tools for various purposes put together by Clark Square Capital on Twitter. https://twitter.com/ClarkSquareCap/status/1645197064488222721

Here are some others I've seen mentioned: Atom Finance, ValueLine, Valueinvestorsclub.com, Twitter, Similarweb and Google Trends for website traffic and consumer interest.

Blogs, company write ups, deep dives, and research reports

I would advise, as you start to get your arms around the basics, start analyzing and writing! Find topics, companies, or industries that interest you, study them, and write about what you learn. There are lots of ways to do this, ranging from detailed investment write ups to just writing about some aspect of a company or industry. MBI Deep Dives, linked below, is a great substack that goes deep on companies - I have shared his deep dive write up on Sherwin Williams, with permission from the author (most of his deep dives are behind a paywall). Julie Young's blog writes about companies that interest her - without trying to be comprehensive, she's just trying to add her perspective as someone who has studied that company. The Oracle of Omaha blog is focused on making an investment case for certain companies the author wanted to invest in. Julie and MBI have also shown an excellent ability to use twitter effectively to share their ideas, get feedback, and build an audience to create revenue and/or opportunities for themselves. I have seen several others use twitter/substack/blogs as an effective tool to demonstrate their investment capabilities and break into the industry.

• https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/shw/
• https://julieyoung.substack.com/
• https://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/

The Art of Investing "Podclass"

Paul Buser and Rick Buhrman of Sator Grove Holdings have taught, for years, a class at Notre Dame called the Art of Investing. For the first time, in 2023, they have created a "podclass" following the guest speakers and learnings from the course. I highly recommend giving it a listen. Learn more here.