The Sleuth Investor: Uncover the Best Stocks Before They make Their Move

by Avner Mandelman

To make real money in the stock market you have to act like a sleuth. It's not enough to rely on SEC files, annual reports, and press releases. To uncover the most lucrative investments, you must dig beneath the printed surface of public information and sleuth for physical evidence. This is the only way to reveal the actual truth about a company's real value-and its future. Investing expert Avner Mandelman honed this highly effective, money-sleuthing approach at his investment firm, Giraffe Capital Corporation. Now, in The Sleuth Investor, he shares his proven intelligence-gathering methods for obtaining exclusive information even before industry insiders do-and using it to gain a decisive edge in buying and selling stock. Through step-by-step guidance and illustrative examples, Mandelman demonstrates how you can track the four physical elements of a People (employees, customers, suppliers), Product (inventory, the product's physical movement, competing products), Plant (production facilities, offices), and Periphery (physical surroundings, community, the economic eco-chain). Obtaining physical clues gives you the ability to anticipate key company developments, such as imminent high growth, a coming disaster you can short profitably, and new product launches. Using Mandelman's strategies and techniques, you'll learn how

Genres: Finance

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Avner Mandelman was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War. His story collection Talking to the Enemy was chosen by Kirkus as one of the twenty-five best books of 2005, and by the ALA as the first recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature.

Several of Avner's stories were anthologized, including the Pushcart Prize, the Best American Short Stories, and the Journey prize.

Avner's literary thriller The Debba, the first in the Undertaker trilogy, won the Arthur Ellis Award for best mystery novel, and was listed for the Scotia Giller prize.

His latest book, The Undertaker's Daughter, is second in the Trilogy, and a third book is planned.

Avner also writes investment books, based on his original approach to sleuthing for physical information-- an approach that also serves him well in writing vivid & emotionally gripping fiction.

Avner has a B.Sc. from the Israeli Technion, an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and an MA in English / Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.
He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Reviews

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although some of the points that the author makes in the initial chapters seem rather unrealistic for the everyday person to accomplish, this book really made me sit back and think hard about the message it was portraying.

The author starts by discussing how to sleuth a company based on the key employees and the customers. In both cases he discusses meeting the relevant people and attempting to gain their trust in person. This is not really something that I can see the majority of people (including myself) being able to have the influence to accomplish for anything but the smallest local companies. However, the real value in these chapters are to be gained from the mindset that he is proposing rather than the ways to accomplish it. The important take-aways from this is to really think about who all these people are and what their priorities and interests are. For the customers he describes how different types of customers can mean different things to a company and this is where I gained the most insight. It really got me thinking about a company and the customers in a different way to the normal reports and figures that you see bantered around. Later on he goes into detail about how to sleuth others areas of a company, all in legal ways.

The really gem of this book is about highlighting how to try and think differently to the crowd when assessing a company as an investment. The only flaw that I can claim it has is that the techniques he describes may be fine for a fund manager to find the time and resources to do, but may not be so accessible to the typical individual investor.


In summary, I'd recommend anyone interested in investing read this book. He doesn't use much industry jargon and the book should be accessible to anyone with even the slightest amount of investing knowledge. Even those who are technical investors would do well to pick this book up even just for the challenge to think a little differently. The book itself reads really well and the author has done a great job of keeping the content enjoyable.

[Johan Monge · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only book I've found that explains how to develop an informational edge, primarily through direct conversations. Investors' often introverted natures contrast starkly with Mandelman's methods, and our reluctance to adhere to his sleuthing philosophy is exactly what makes it so worthwhile; This book has little publicity and we would be wise to keep it that way

[Turgut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good one!

[Earl Inglis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good and some fantasy

[bookreader]

Investing as investigatory field craft is not a new concept. Philip Fisher first wrote about ''scuttlebutt'' in 1958; we applied the approach extensively at Janus.

[Nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good practical insights on conducting differentiated physical research. Unlike most investing books that espouse ideology.