The Billion Dollar Mistake: Learning the Art of Investing Through the Missteps of Legendary Investors 1st Edition

Like golfers and fishermen, professional investors love talking about their greatest successes. However, as an investor I rarely find value in reading backslapping accounts of trades that made some investor wildly rich.Thankfully, "The Billion Dollar Mistake" is NOT one of those investor victory parades. Far from it.Author and Wall Street veteran Stephen L. Weiss has taken precisely the opposite tack, with great results. In "The Billion Dollar Mistake", he chronicles the single worst trade made by each of a dozen or so legendary investors. It's a well-researched set of cautionary tales. I enjoyed and learned from them.That this book exists at all seems remarkable. Weiss has gotten some of the world's leading money managers and industrialists to talk about their most embarrassing fumbles. I can't imagine that these investors wanted to revisit their biggest professional mistakes, but they do here. It's fascinating to read what they have to say about their worst investing errors. The details are captivating.This book is much more than simply an enjoyable read. The stories hammer home some important investing rules: Do your own homework. Spread your bets. Be careful with margin. Use derivatives like options sparingly. Respect market volatility. Avoid crowded trades.An even more important message comes from reading one after another of these massive miscues: Watch out, investors, hubris is always lurking. Weiss shows that each of these legendary professionals strayed dangerously from the investment discipline that made them successful. To me, these mistakes weren't about greed, they were about ego and infallibility. At some point, flush with years of success, each investor seemed to decide that his trade had to be right if he himself was willing to make it. History proved each to be dead wrong."The Billion Dollar Mistake" is a savvy and fresh look at markets, investing and human nature.

I gave it three stars. It was a good book, but not as good as it could have been. How could it have been better?First, though the introduction indicates that the author had access to many of the investors profiled, there are precious few statements in the investors' own words about what THEY THINK about their mistakes. It seemed like most of the book was just culled from newspaper accounts.Second, I don't know specifically how the author could have avoided this (admittedly, it's the point of the book I suppose), but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the guy on the sidelines employing 20/20 hindsight to critique the missteps of the guy who was actually in the arena. A great book called the Halo Effect makes the compelling case that so much supposed business analysis is simply ex post narration of what happened as though it was inevitable (if a new product works, they were bold and smart, if it fails, they "strayed from their core competencies"). For instance, in the Cooperman chapter, Cooperman is criticized for playing in an inefficient market with little information. But that's the whole point: homeruns are found in inefficient markets where no one is looking. If he had been right, we'd all say he was a genius. I guess what I'm saying is that I resist the notion that there is always some folly or brilliance at work in a given investment.Although I'm skeptical that each mistake can be distilled down to pithy truths as the book implies, I still think it's worth reading. The biographical backgrounds in each chapter are interesting and inspiring to any aspiring investor, and the reader will gain insights into how each investor approaches investing generally, even if that's a more complicated thing than a few bullet points can convey.

This is a book on the biggest losses on stock market investing. The book consists of 11 stories on stock market losses and every single one of them is bigger than $1 billion dollars. Every story has its unique lesson and beaty for you the investor. In my opinion is a book that can help you become a better investor.

Amidst a sea of worthless and often inane books on investing, The Billion Dollar Mistake stands apart by offering a unique vantage point into the world of finance - the one straight from those who have been most successful in it. Filled with insights that go beyond business, the book is extremely well written and an exceptional read. The appeal of the book goes well beyond those in finance, and is a great purchase/gift for anyone with even a passing interest in recent events which we can all now appreciate as being germaine to people from nearly every walk of life.

Overhyped indeed. I bit and got burned by this joke of a book. Written in simplistic 6th grade prose, a breezy Schadenfreude account of how some overleveraged rich lost money in the crash of 2008. I expected more details, not stuff, as another reviewer put it, that I could have gotten reading a newspaper.An overpriced book. I bought the Kindle edition. What a regrettable waste of time and money. Would give it one star but at least there's some depth to the book, insofar as it gives a thumbnail sketch of each protagonist.

This book by Weiss, is a gift for all ages, from college to retirees ! It tells stories that every one identifies with ! It's amazing to read how professionals are human like everyone else. You can't go wrong giving this to your kids and all your friends.They will all thank you.