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A great value investor needs to be a business analyst who grasps the competitive dynamics of businesses, who knows accounting - the language of business, who can value companies and also understand the psychology of others and himself. An excellent investor needs to be a contrarian. Reading value investing books is often a rehearsal on these key themes. Expectations Investing by Alfred Rappaport and Michael Mauboussin is no different.

If you were to analyze poker, it’s basically a game of decision making under uncertainty. Should I call? Raise? Go all in? Or maybe fold? The only thing you know for sure is the hand you are dealt. The uncertainty lies in everything else.

For the last decade of declining interest rates traditional low valuation multiple, deep value investing has not fared at all well. Thus, value investing has gradually migrated to a position of investing in quality growth, compounding franchise types of stocks. Charlie Tian, the founder of the popular value investing website GuruFocus.com, has written a useful beginner’s guide to this value investing 2.0 style. Quite fittingly Tom Russo has written one of the recommendations on the cover, as he is probably the closest to the ideal investor in the genre that Tian advocates.

The background here is that a business professor, the author Anurag Sharma, grows increasingly puzzled over the discrepancy between the teachings on finance he meets in his academic environment and the investment customs he witnesses among successful practitioners. After reading up on the subject he rejects his fellow scholars, starts a class in value investing and later writes Book of Value, a book along the lines of Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.