Book Review - Margin of Safety

Summary - (paraphrased from the book's introduction)
The first section of this book examines some of the places where investors stumble.

• Chapter 1: differences between investing and speculation
  
• Chapter 2: how Wall Street maximizes its own best interests, which aren't necessarily aligned with investors.
  
• Chapter 3: the behavior and influence of institutional investors
• Chapter 4: a case study of junk bonds to illustrate many of the pitfalls highlighted in the first three chapters

The second section...explores the philosophy and substance of value investing.

• Chapter 5: risk aversion and its investment implications
• Chapter 6: the philosophy of value investing and the meaning and importance of a margin of safety
  
• Chapter 7: three underpinnings to value investing: a bottom-up approach to investment selection, an absolute-performance orientation, and analytical emphasis on risk as well as return
  
• Chapter 8: the principal methods of securities valuation used by value investors

The third section...describes the value investment process, the implementation of a value investing process.

• Chapter 9: the research and analytical process - how ideas are found and evaluated
• Chapter 10: sample value investment opportunities
• Chapter 11: thrift conversions
• Chapter 12: financially distressed securities
• Chapter 13: portfolio management and trading
• Chapter 14: investment manager selection
  

Review -

• This is the best introduction I've read to investing. The author is clear, concise, and covers all of the important points. If this were an in-print <$10 paperback, I would pass copies out to friends/acquaintences who don't have an investing background.
• This is not a how-to, like Graham's Security Analysis. The second section is just an overview of valuation methods. As such, this books apparent value as a collectable is confusing to me.
• The recommended "hunting grounds" in the book's third section is relatively short and weak compared compared with Greenblatt's You Can Be a Stock Market Genius.
• I would particularly recommend this for pre-college students interested in finance. Klarman's criticisms of academic and Wall Street finance would have been valuable to think about while learning the former and considering employment in the latter.
  

Bottom Line - Perhaps the best introduction to investing (or value investing).