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The Big Short by Michael Lewis featured the stories of the first individuals to bet against the US housing market before the 07/08 financial crisis. Michael Burry was said to be the first to do so.

Not only was Michael (Mike) Burry said to have been one of the first to do so, he was also one of the most dogmatic in his approach.

Michael Burry's 4 must read investment books

Originally a doctor, Michael Burry spent countless hours learning to be a stock market investor by writing a stock market blog and investing himself  throughout the late 90′s and early 00′s. By the end of decade, he would be the instigator of billions of dollars of bets against the US housing market.

An intriguing character in the book who also turned an original $100,000 in his Scion Capital hedge fund into hundreds of millions, I spent some time trying to find excerpts from his early blog and forum posts.

One of the excerpts (including the 4 books he recommends to all those new to investing) is below:

Re: books

To get started, I’d suggest the following four books:

• The Intelligent Investor by Graham
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Fisher
• Why Stocks Go Up and Down by Pike
• Buffettology by Buffett and Clark

If you read these books thoroughly and in that order and never touch another book, you’ll have all you need to know. Another book you might want to consider is Value Investing made easy by Janet Lowe – a quick read. I have a fairly extensive listing of books on my site, with my reviews of them, and links to purchase them at amazon [Michael Burry's site no longer live].

My problem is I’ve read way too much. One book stated, “If you’re not a voracious reader, you’ll probably never be a great investor.” But sometimes I wish I had a more focused knowledge base so that my investment strategy wouldn’t get all cluttered up.

Re: Security Analysis (Graham and Dodd) you can get a lot of the same info in a more accessible format elsewhere, but everyone says that Buffett’s favorite version is the 1951 edition. Yes there are differences, and the current version has a lot of non-Graham like stuff in it.

Good Investing,Mike

For a full list of his comments and posts, you can visit this Michael Burry profile on Silicon Investor.

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