Folks-F Wall Street, the book, is now available for preorder online at Amazon.com and Borders.com. (Barnes & Noble isn’t listing it just yet.)
Needless to say, I’m excited!
Amazon.com is listing it at $10.85, a discount to the full price when the final release comes out on June 9, 2009. In the spirit of buying assets on the cheap, now might be a good time to preorder your copy!
To accompany the release, the website has been updated. If you subscribe to F Wall Street through RSS, you’ll notice that you now get the full posts right to your reader.
You can also subscribe through e-mail using the form on the right.
I’ve recategorized the posts to make a little more sense of the blog. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for all your patience and support! You really make F Wall Street a ton of fun!
Filed under: Miscellaneous
As I long time lurker, I thought I would take this opportunity to say congratulations on the book and to thank you for this site. This is the bloig I visit most frequently and its definately worth its weight in gold. Not sure when we’ll be able to get the book here in the UK, but I will be on it as soon as it is available.
Congrats again!
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I have been waiting a long time for this. It will be a pleasant surprise when it comes in the mail 4 months from now.
Congradulations Joe, not only on the book, but for creating a website that actually educates people and makes it fun in the process. I’ve learned alot from this blog and I look forward to doing some reading on the beach this summer.
Thank you for everything you’ve done.
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Thanks, all, for the kind words. I’m very excited too!
I don’t know if it will be available for Kindle. I will e-mail the publisher as soon as I’m done here, and I’ll let you know when I do.
I’d self-publish an audio book, but I’d probably go off on ten thousand tangents and it would end up being a 500 hour podcast 
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Joe- As an client and frequent visitor of this site, I could not be more proud of the work you have done! I could not be more happy for you on your personal success as you have helped made me a success during this tough times. All the best with the book– Any chance for an earlier release (like April 23rd?!?!?!)
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I guess that the book has shipped, though it isn’t supposed to be out yet. The publisher said June 9th; Amazon lists June 18th. And yet some people have already finished reading it!
Thanks, MikeR, for your feedback. Clearly the editor missed these typos, though I’m certain that they found many more in my original work! As you find them, please feel free to keep listing them here!
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Joe, thank you for this phenomenal book. It almost felt like this is value investing for “dummies”. It provides a fresh perspective and talks about business at very personal level. This is extremely helpful for someone who wants to be a business investor, but lack real experience in running a business. There are many good value investing books, but yours provide so much more detail and good illustration of many important ideas.
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Purchased the book last week from Barnes and Noble and read it in three days. I enjoyed reading the book and have a few questions.
1) In your book you say on page 7 “Most mutual fund companies are paid based on how much money they manage rather than on how well they manage it.” However, doesn’t your investment firm Meridian Business Group do the same thing by charging a fee on how much money you manage? What is the difference?
2) Your book mostly focuses on businesses with stable growth. However, what would your opinion be of a company that has a market cap of 1B and FCF of 700M with declining FCF. The low market cap and high FCF make the company compelling however is this a cigar butt? This was a very profitable company for many years and then all of a sudden technology made it practically irrelevant. Is this another factor that we should take into account with investing, if future technology changes could possibly help or hurt the company?
3) Any thoughts on my previous post http://www.fwallstreet.co...
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Rona: Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Steve: Great questions.
- Hands down, performance-only fees are the most “fair” way to compensate an advisor. Unfortunately, the law doesn’t allow advisors to charge performance fees to most clients. (Clients have to be “qualified” with means $5 million in investments or some similar requirement.) The differences between us and mutual funds are numerous, but the big one in relation to your question is that we don’t have a never-ending potential client and salesforce base to throw money at us. So long as the mutual funds keep Wall Street happy, those funds will find their way into portfolios and 401ks plans.
It’s true that we work off a performance-only fee for certain clients and an asset-based fee for non-qualified clients, but our asset-based fee is just 1% compared to the 1.61% charged by U.S. stock mutual funds in 2008 (excluding any additional fees those investors pay to brokers or advisors for putting them in those mutual funds). If we can’t work on a performance-only basis for the client with $50,000 at our firm, I don’t know of a better way to keep us accountable than asset-based fees.
- Every business has a value (even if that value is zero). The question on this business is: How much cash could I pull out of the business during its remaining life? For example, if the company will be obsolete in five years and will, at that point, close up shop, the price you pay today will determine your results. If the cash flow all goes to the “asset” side of the balance sheet and the business winds down in two years, ultimately liquidating everything, paying off obligations and debts, and distributing the remaining cash to shareholders, then the price you pay today for that cash determines your return.
Let’s say that the business shuts down in five years and pays out to shareholders $1 billion in net assets (say, $50 per share). The most you could pay today to earn 15% a year would be $25. Over five years, $25 to $50 is about 15% a year.
In any investment, you have to figure out how much cash you, as an owner, could pull out during its remaining life. I don’t know if I made that abundantly clear in the book, but I think that reading the book and this website should help clarify things. Let me know if that helps.
- Creating a short list of wonderful companies, watching them closely, and investing in them when they are cheap will only make you rich! That’s exactly what people should do. As to your point on public vs. private, companies go public for a number of reasons – expansion financing, to allow the owner to cash out some of his otherwise illiquid investment, etc. Some publicly traded companies have superior economics and are run by wonderful managers; most are lacking in one or both of those areas.
If you keep in mind that these are businesses, and that you can shun stocks and instead invest in private businesses, real estate, art, or anything else in the world of investment opportunities, you’ll realize that there’s no need to settle for mediocre stocks. Buy the best (or cheapest based on valuations) stocks, and leave the rest for the mutual fund managers. If you can’t find opportunities in stocks, go buy an apartment building or dry cleaner. Make sense?
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Woohoo! Finally able to read a quality book rather than the junk publishers spit out to make money. I’m in. Hope this becomes a best seller and just gotta admit the title is a killer.
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