Classics (Vertin and Ellis)

Why it’s on the list: An anthology of the investment literature — excerpts, essays, letters and speeches from the people who built the field, with commentary by Charles D. Ellis and James R. Vertin — on the premise that most of what matters in investing was already written down well somewhere, and the useful exercise is reading the originals rather than the summaries.

Where I heard about it

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 15 of the section on Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism, where his reading lineage points to these anthologies for the primary literature itself.

About this edition

A second volume, Classics II: Another Investor’s Anthology, followed in 1991 and is the next entry on Li Lu’s list.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• Classics II — Another Investor’s Anthology — the 1991 second volume, entry 16 on the same list.
• The Intelligent Investor — the canonical primary text the anthology draws on.
• Money Masters of Our Time — John Train’s survey, the entry immediately before this one on the list.
• Value Investing — the tradition being anthologised.