Investing Against the Tide: Lessons from a Life Running Money: Amazon.co.uk: Anthony Bolton: Books

Product Description

This authoritative and accessible investment classic promises rare insight into what it really takes to run money in a top-performing investment fund.

Anthony Bolton, the UK’s most successful stock market investor, tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter in picking a stock: the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully.

It’s not easy to continually buy low and sell high. This book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time.

Anthony Bolton is considered the UK’s most successful stock market investor and fund manager. Over twenty five years he delivered a market-beating return of 20% in his Fidelity Special Situations Fund. How did he do it, and what can you learn from him?

In Investing Against the Tide, Anthony Bolton tells the story of his contrarian approach to managing money. He provides invaluable lessons on the factors that really matter when investing: how to pick a stock, the need to identify good managers, how to run a portfolio, the importance of value investing, reading charts and how to trade successfully.

In this account of financial accomplishment, Bolton reveals the secrets of his success. It’s not easy constantly to buy low and sell high and this book gives clear directions for doing well in the stock market, and doing well consistently. Chapter by chapter Investing Against the Tide shows you how to make the right decisions at the right time and featured key lessons show you how you really can learn from a life running money.

Investing Against the Tideis an authoritative guide for investment professionals, offering them a rare insight into what it really takes to run money in a top-performing fund, as well as providing amateur investors the chance to learn the stock-picking strategies from a leading money-manager.

About the author

Anthony Bolton left Cambridge University with a degree in engineering to begin a career in the City. He started as a graduate trainee working for Keyser Ullmann in 1971 before taking up a full time position as an assistant in their investment department. In 1976 he moved to Schlesingers where he became, for the first time, an investment manager. In 1979, aged 29, he was recruited by Fidelity, the international fund management group, as one of its first London-based investment managers, a move that proved to be the launch of a long and successful career. In surveys of professional investors, he is regularly voted the fund manager most respected by his peers. He retired from full-time investment management at the end of 2007, but continues to work at Fidelity as a mentor of the analysts and younger fund managers as well as being involved in overseeing Fidelity’s investment process. His hobby is composing classical music. Anthony Bolton is married with three children and lives in West Sussex.

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

Insight into the thinking of a great investor 6 Sep 2009

By J. Jorge

Format:Hardcover

I bought the book hesitantly after reading some of the negative reviews. What tilted the balance towards giving the book the benefit of the doubt was that Mr. Bolton is a great investor - and great investors are always worth listening to - and that in the few occassions I had seen him interviewed on TV I was always impressed. After reading it, I'm very happy I did. Whereas there is no new gold nugget or secret formula that some of the negative reviewers seemed to be expecting, the value of the book lies in showing how a successful investor approaches investing. That in itself must be very valuable. The book is very easy to read with no numbers or charts. It must be to the credit of the writer that he still manages to make his points clearly.

By the way, Mr. Bolton is the only investor I know who called the bottom of the 2007-09 bear market within days of it happening (first half of March 09) when everyone else was convinced it was a bear market rally. Last year, when bank stocks were the last thing anyone wanted to have, he said on Bloomberg TV that he would see it as a good idea to start buying a diversified portfolio of bank shares. Then a few months later he called the low, by implication telling you when you should be loading up on bank shares. You would have easily trippled your money in a few months if you had followed his advice, and this from an investor focusing on years, not months, and on a diversified portfolio, not on a single stock, where trippling is more common. So, there you go, probably the investment tip of the decade, delivered for free.

I do recommend the book, and thank Mr. Bolton for sharing his wisdom.

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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful

Neither particularly illuminating nor particularly useful for private investors (nor professional ones, most likely) 13 May 2009

By T. M�ller

It is not quite clear who the target audience of his book is supposed to be, nor what its purpose is. I suspect neither private nor professional investors nor anyone else with rudimentary financial knowledge for that matter will find much of interest in this book in terms of investing advice. And those who are looking to find out more about Anthony Bolton the person will be disappointed as well. In short, probably anyone can give this book a miss.

"Lessons from a Life Running Money" reads the subtitle, but there are not really that many practical lessons to be found, and the few that are not covered by common-sense already are impossible for private investors to follow, and too vague for professional investors to find useful even if they have the resources described at their disposal.

Written in a rather tiresome, almost diary-like, prose the book is riddled with nuggets of wisdom such as "[On information sources, analyst research] Over time, I've found some commentators more useful than others and I will spend more time on their output. I've spent years accumulating knowledge about who is useful and who is not." - Oh really? Who'd have thought!

What the book lacks in practical advice or lucidity, it can't make up with amusing or insightful anecdotes either.

However, not all is bad: novice investors will find all the usual investment insights (hard to time the market, take a long-term view, be contrarian, knowing when to sell is as important as knowing when to buy, basic asset allocation principles etc.) covered, along with a bullet point summary at the end of book. Having said that, the author rarely tries to explain or reason, but mostly just states (pontificates, some might say) his views and insights as he sees them. This of course is to be expected given the format of the book, but not particularly helpful.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

The voice of experience 8 July 2009

By J. Blair

Mr Bolton helped me to make many of my clients a lot of money over the years and the book reveals a surprising simplicity to his methods and whats clearly important - hard work, eye-to-eye contact with managers and a mixture of a proven system but also flexibility. Essential reading for any UK investors.