The best and certainly most enjoyable way to learn about business is through stories. Harvard Business School realizes this, which is why it relies on its famous case studies for its MBA classes. But for the rest of us, there are memoirs offering a glimpse into the worlds of writers who played roles, however small, in American finance.

Money has its list of the top six financial memoirs, all of which are quite good. I would strongly urge you to pick up all of those at your local library (with the possible exception of Ben Franklin's which, alas, is rather unreadable). Here are two more you may want to check out:

Jim Cramer's Confessions of a Street Addict. This is Cramer's memoir of his days as a hedge fund manager -- screaming orders, throwing phones, and generally acting even more insane than he does on his TV show. It's an incredibly engaging book, and you may be surprised at what a terrifically talented journalist Jim Cramer is. Had he chosen journalism as a career over the financial markets, he probably would have become equally famous in that field. Regardless of what you think of his stock picks, Jim Cramer is a brilliant man and this is a brilliant book.

Andrew Tobias' The Funny Money Game. Before he was famous for his book The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, Tobias was a vice president at a high-flying momentum stock called National Student Marketing, debating what island to retire to when his rich options package vested. Unfortunately, NSM collapsed in scandal, leaving Tobias' options worthless, but he still leaves us with this hilarious memoir about the life of a young executive at a chaotic young company embarking on almost-weekly acquisitions.

Money magazine's best financial memoirs, and my favorites originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ya know those books from Playboy that are so good you can't put them down until you finish?

Great Business Disasters: Swindlers, Bunglers and Frauds in American Industry, edited by Isadore Barmash and published by the Playboy Press, is just that kind of book. I would actually say that it's the most interesting book of business history I've ever encountered. And it's out of print.

Great Business Disasters is an anthology of some of the best financial journalism of the era, with a special focus on longer pieces covering frauds and mess-ups. We get a piece by John Brooks (author of the also-excellent Once in Golconda) on the infamous Ford Edsel and a fascinating piece by a very young Andrew Tobias on the National Student Marketing fiasco, who worked as a marketing director for the company.

There are a total of 15 accounts of some of the greatest and most infamous mess-ups in business history. Some of these are more obscure but still fascinating, and you're unlikely to find out about them outside of this book.

Reading Great Business Disasters, I couldn't help but lament the fact that this sort of long-form journalism is dying. Only a few great writers -- Gary Weiss and Herb Greenberg come to mind -- are carrying on this art. With Rupert Murdoch having complained that he finds The Wall Street Journal's feature stories too long, this situation seems likely to get worse.

Someone really needs to get the rights to this book and put it back in print -- It could be updated with some of The Wall Street Journal's accounts of the Enron blow-up and, of course, my coverage of Usana Health Sciences (Kidding...). Fortunately, the book is still available. Here are some places to get it used:

• On eBay
• AbeBooks
• Amazon.com (As low as a penny!)

Book Review: Great Business Disasters originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The February 12th issue of Time features a story called "China Braces for a Bubble." The piece points to numerous signs of an unsustainable speculative bull market including novice investors with no experience in the market borrowing money to invest in stock, astronomically high price/earnings multiples, and price discrepancies (shares trading at widely different prices on different exchanges.

But Lan Xue, head of China Research for Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C), tells us not to worry: "Judging from history, the stock market doesn't bust when the buying is concentrated on blue-chip names. It's when the buying goes into the second line, third line, fourth line [companies] --the speedy names -- this is what would get me more worried."

Oh really. Investors who lost money buying the Nifty 50 during the 1960's and 70's would be surprised to learn that blue-chip stocks can become grossly overvalued as well. Andrew Tobias, author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, summed up the Nifty 50 bubble well on his website. Nor should investors content themselves with the belief that the rapid growth that is probable in China will lead these stocks to be strong performers. I would argue that the most important lesson for every investor to learn is this: a good business does not a good stock make. Valuation matters. From Tobias's site:

Well, Avon was close to 140 in mid-1973 and under 20 by the Fall of 1974 (and what a Fall it was)... Disney dropped from 210 at the end of 1972 to 31 less than two years later...The fall wasn't fast in the sense of its taking just a week or two...But these companies were basically doing fine...just their stock price multiples that were deflating. Where once they had been selling at 60 times earnings, the world changed and now they were selling at 15 or 20 times.

Continue reading Don't count on the blue chips

Don't count on the blue chips originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 04 Feb 2007 18:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.