Pitch the Perfect Investment: The Essential Guide to Winning on Wall Street (Wiley Finance)

If you are young and want to work in securities field, you must buy this one. For others, the book is notable both for being an entertaining if biased read on the 'proper way of picking securities' - and that's mostly a good thing.Some observations:*the tone is light and entertaining. The book is obviously directed at a younger (white) urban hip audience, with cute illustrations and step by step instructions which border on the sublime (hair care gets addressed multiple times) with the Beatles, Gordon Gekko, and SNL references galore. This is a pretty big departure both in form and substance from most books of this type and make it even more valuable for that reason. After all, to the uninitiated these topics get dry at times but the authors skillfully skirt the boredom.*the book is essentially a series of introductory sections in all manner of investment topics, including valuation, competitive advantage, crowd behavior and behavioral finance, and lot of other things besides. As such, it is handy - no more running to this book or that one, but it stands out more as a single source volume which will encourage the reader to move beyond which is a good thing.*if this matters, the book favors academic valuation over practical ones and thus fosters the typical snob appeal that many value investors hold over other methods of picking stocks. There is, for example, no mention of Peter Lynch or Jim Cramer or Value Line, and if the deep-thinking but excruciating to apply books from Damodoran or Mauboussin appeal to you then you will love this one. The book reaches a height of this absurdity when it claims that practically all valuation methods equate to discounted cash flow models which even if true becomes absolutely irrelevant (just make money). There is a danger in assuming sophistication and science in what is a field where art is a vital component in success, but given the tone in this book many young analysts may adhere to a rigid dogma instead of a more practical process of making sure picks go up. Yet, this is just a personal quibble and obvious enough to anyone with any experience (short hair does not make a successful stock pick, and some of the managers described are idiots), but it might explain why some oddball profiles on a site like VIC get bad ratings (doesn't fit the religion) but make tons of money.All in all, I'd highly recommend this one for the Intended audience, and it should be paired with "Best Practices for Equity Research Analysts" for a very strong foundation before reality sets in and the only thing that matters is beating an index - and attending to your own personal grooming.P.S. These days, it is hard to take any book seriously in this field without knowing the author's investment track record (not job title), but this one skirts that issue because a co-author also helped write 'Gorilla Game', one of the most important and influential investment books of the past 20 years.

If you're a young professional who's read several investment books and is struggling to move from theory to working in the investment business, make Pitch the Perfect Investment #1 on your reading stack. This practical guide was missing when I graduated university 7 years ago. While I had read numerous investment classics and valuation textbooks, I found these readings didn't translate well into the field. It's one thing to quote Buffett and Klarman. It's another to pitch an idea to an aggressive portfolio manager and secure a job.Pitch the Perfect Investment provides the missing bridge. The book accomplishes two goals: (i) synthesizing investment theory to create practical analytical tools and (ii) teaching readers to select a security appropriate for the fund s/he is pitching to and to deliver a well-organized and effective pitch.The first section covers familiar investment topics, including asset valuation, market efficiency, competitive advantage, and behavioral finance. However, this section adds to the existing literature by neatly synthesizing the ideas and turning them into practical analytical tools. Chapters 5-8, for example, synthesize market efficiency, behavioral finance, and the research process. Chapter 5 covers the requirements for market efficiency (information must be disseminated, properly processed, and incorporated into the share price through trading) and then turns theory into a tool by training analysts to hunt for stocks where the requirements for market efficiency don’t hold. Chapters 6-7 then review the research on behavioral finance and crowd psychology to help the analyst identify these breakdowns and Chapter 8 concludes by showing how the research process can exploit them. The authors also provide a case study to put everything into context.Ambitious young professionals (myself included) often fall into traps in the real world. Common mistakes include pitching deep value stocks to funds looking for high-quality companies, spending 10 minutes describing a company’s business and industry rather than showing how an idea will generate alpha, and failing to deliver a pitch in only a few minutes. Section 2 is the missing key for young professionals and provides practical advice on selecting a security that will interest the portfolio manager, structuring a pitch, and concisely delivering a pitch. This section could have saved me years in a career.The book is also a very pleasant read. Paul & Paul have decades of teaching experience and it shows. They concise, entertaining, witty, and avoid verbiage.

Arrived promptly, perfect packaging. I have now read the book and would definitely recommend, easy to read and includes really good examples/cases from which you can learn and useful tips to apply on a daily basis.

Very well written and insightful

This is excellent choice for new analysts or intermediate level individual investors. The book explains efficient market hypothesis and how investor should interpret and use that knowledge. This discussion is alone worth 10 times the price of the book for value investors who take advantage of irrational investor behavior. They clearly articulate how to look at valuation and how to determine if the stock is truly inefficiently priced and if yes then what are the reasons. They have given circumstances in which a stock can gets mispriced. Every investor needs to check if any one of these situation truly exists in his idea.The authors are veteran fund managers and Columbia Uni professors teaching the same topic. This book is the exposition of hat they really teach in their course. So this is an opportunity for you to take that course at far less cost. The authors give a framework on how to analyze the ideas and how to conduct due diligence. Often there is a reason why stock is cheap. This framework will force you to be honest with yourself and evaluate objectively if the opportunity is really a genuine opportunity or a value trap. Their is lot of discussion on how one should preset his ideas. This is valuable for equity analysts. But also for individual investors in order to put their investing rationale in an objective manner. Many investors are members of investor groups and they often discuss their ideas in the groups. This presentation knowledge will help them articulate their ideas to others.The book is a result of combined 50-60 years of professional investing and teaching experience. There is significant value in this book for intermediate and advanced level investors and analysts. The book can help you go to next level in your investing journey.

If you are new to finance, and have never googled "discounted cash flow" and "stock pitch", then ignore this review. This book will be wonderful as an introduction. Otherwise please take a read and see if you really want to spend the money.If you've had any academic exposure to finance in the last decade this book will be completely useless with the exception of a few items. The authors have a youtube video for the CFA New York Society where they talked about writing this book in a lecture they give on pitching the perfect investment. The book itself is far from what they originally set out to create.The authors first start off with a look at how to value stocks. They use highly theoretical examples which have no bearing on reality. It all sounds super cool and genius until you get to the end and realize that its all absurdity which is extremely difficult to implement in real life. Then the authors undermine their own concepts in valuation by subsequently presenting the idea of uncertainty. After going through 170 pages of this crap, you realize that a basic DCF model with sensitivity analysis (google Damodaran) will provide more value to you than the first half of this book.These old farts continue on their ramblings to speak about behavioural finance as if they are an authority on the matter. They just regurgitate the work of others, in a less comprehensive and less meaningful manner by relying on a plethora of anecdotes as a primary mechanism to communicate concepts.This anecdotal 'teaching' is a real problem throughout the book, as the authors are just filling pages to make the book longer. The entirety of the information could be highly condensed such that the reader would not waste their time digging for meaning through idealized hypotheticals.After page 195 you'll be exposed to a simplistic equation which has a very simple meaning. The authors explain it, and then proceed to beat the dead horse for another 50 pages. Best part is, that you'll never ever need to use this equation or give a hoot about the details. This is so academic in nature that unless you are doing a PhD, you won't ever care about the majority (99%) of Chapter 6.About page 267, (of ~430) is when you'll remember that the book is titled "Pitch the Perfect Investment" but you haven't read anything about pitching an investment yet. Now the authors talk about how to add value through research. Here you may glean a thing or two, but its mostly a rehash of prior chapters. Basically just think independently, consider other views, and magically create a set of life experiences that will give you an analytical advantages. Real rocket science stuff.Next you'll read about risk. Here you'll be inundated with pictures of normal distributions (ha! like stuff is actually normally distributed in finance), and the whole thing is ultra-academic in nature. If you haven't sensed a recurring theme of non applicable theory by now, you will surely get one after reading this chapter.What really enticed me to grind through the ramblings of the authors was the next chapters on selecting a security and pitching the perfect investment (yes! finally there are a few pages on the subject implied by the title of the book). Now remember how the authors were talking about being independent and thinking for yourself... you do? Good. Now throw all of that our and break out the knee pads. According to the authors, analysts should be pitching investments that meet the criteria of the portfolio manager. So figure out what the PM likes and then deliver that. Don't worry about providing unique ideas that could generate alpha. Worry about your job security and making sure your ideas are well liked. The hypocrisy is overwhelming at this stage, especially considering the big stink the authors made earlier on regarding how most PM's cannot deliver performance. Keep in mind that on Wall St. it doesn't matter if you are a good analyst in the absolute sense; what matters is if you are a good analyst in the eyes of your PMs. So you're going to do what it is you need to do to keep your job; which in the vast majority of cases means you can ignore the notion of finding alpha.If you move with the herd, when consensus is wrong you are wrong; but you now can claim that everyone else was wrong at the same time so no biggie. If you move independently, when you are wrong and everyone else is right; kiss your job goodbye. Survival instincts and incentive pay are in direct conflict to objectivity and independence; which do you think you will choose when you have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed? Even with an entire chapter on behavioural finance, the authors don't address this at all, they are too busy writing hyper-theoretical papers for the CFAI anyhow. Reality is harsh, and Wall St. is about taking money from your pocket and putting it into the PM's pocket. Just ask all the PM's who under perform their own self-selected benchmarks, but still get paid a management fee. Yeah... getting paid to manage an under performing fund... makes perfect sense.Now finally getting to the real reason one would buy a book with such a title. Pitching the perfect investment. My advice here is that you go on youtube and watch their video "170927 CFA Society of NYC Author Series Pitch The Perfect Investment." Done. The book does not provide any additional value on this matter.When watching the video play close attention to the authors joking around after the body of their talk. They state a lot of copies of this book are sitting on trading desks. After reading this book, I can see why. It provides excellent value as a paperweight. Not only does it hold them papers down when the HVAC is high, but it also has a nice title to impress your boss and guests in the office. I would not recommend this book unless you are totally clueless or need a paperweight. If you've gone to b-school, finance, have written a level of the CFA exams, or are capable of googling "how to value a stock" you should already know 99% of what is in this book.

Livro muito didático para quem está iniciando sua carreira no mercado financeiro. Acho que cumpre bem o papel que os autores falam no início do livro. Porém, esperava algo mais aprofundado no decorrer do livro que não aconteceu.