I expected more. His methods are expensive because of fees and more work compared to other strategies. Charles Carlson's "Eight Steps to Seven Figures" is better and more inspirational.

If you must read this book, get it from the library, skim it, and invest the money you've saved in a no-load index fund.

Josh Sowin
fireandknowledge.org

I read the book in 2001 after listening to the audio book summary. I then modified his Leaders with Luster strategy and I am still using it today after further slight modifications. The results are outstanding! All his numbers on market capitalization, cashflow etc. are totally outdated by now, but the concept still works and he explains to get updated numbers build into your screening tool. The screen should return about 140 companies, sort them logically and hand pick from there. The same strategy got me into the top 2% of the CNBC portfolio challenge that closed on 5/11/07. Use your head when reading this book and modify the screens to your investment objective. Look at sectors when hand selecting your final stocks and question the number of stocks O'Shaughnessy suggests. This is a great book and his strategies (modified) are still working for me.

This is my first Amazon book review, although I have been reading them for years. I read this book many years ago, and immediately started investing in what was then the O'Shaughnessy Cornerstone Growth Fund (now the Hennessy Cornerstone Growth Fund-HFCGX). This fund is based directly on the investment strategy outlined in this book, and the performance has been outstanding. Since I first started investing in this fund, my two daughers accounts have grown at just under 18% per annum, which I might state is the historical average for this investment strategy if it had been used from 1952 onward. If this per annum return continues, their $10,000 invested in 1999 will turn into over $1 million by the time they are in their mid-forties. I now have rolled over my 401K plan into this same fund based on the principals in this book, and my Roth IRA. I read tons of investment information prior to buying this book, and even invested in a few other funds, but nothing has touched the strategy of the investment information in this book. I highly recommend buying this book.

In this book Mr. O'Shaughnessy takes four different (fictional) characters and shows them how to use his investing methods to beat the market based on his exhaustive study on what really beats the market. Basically this book takes his knowledge from What Works on Wall Street and makes up stories for these couples.

Mr. O'Shaughnessy thinks we should buy 50 stocks and rebalance those 50 stocks at the beginning of each year. In fact I am surprised that I haven't seen FolioFN giving away his books to their members since his methodology seems to be meant for those of us who have folios.

One of the major things that I didn't like about this book was in his descriptions of how these couples could retire rich he basically cut and paste each one and changed the ending result, in my opinion he made this book very boring and is a waste of paper. The only part of this book I liked was pages 139 and 140 these pages have various "doom and gloom" headlines from 1951-1997 and show that the market always has recovered.

Since now the strategies in this book are out in the public they probably won't even work right, so I would advise the majority of investors to put their money in an S&P 500 index fund since you'd be beating 80% of fund manages without having to do any research.

Reed Floren

A truly amazing strategy. I recently concluded tracking a 25-stock Reasonable Runaways strategy and the results are eye-popping. The portfolio turned in a 77.81% return dating from November 8th, 2002 thru November 7th, 2003. I will be putting real money to work now that I was able to see it with my own eyes...