Delivery of business-oriented software and its support has evolved radically over the last 30 years, from licensed mainframe packages with paid consultants, to time-shared program suites with telephone help lines, to personal computer applications with printed manuals and (as storage capacity increased) embedded help files. The latest iteration is software as a service, often delivered via websites accessed through browsers. Such services typically provide online help resources reminiscent of the personal computer model. Tian’s book can be viewed as a return to the printed manual approach that serves not only to support existing users of his online service, but also to advertise its capabilities to readers who have not encountered it.

Tian is a PhD physicist who moved from university research to a high-tech start-up. Motivated by the challenges of evaluating a company’s true value in the venture world, he began to collect insights from value investors such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Donald Yachtman, the “gurus” of his title. He developed computational tools that implement the decision principles advocated by these investors, and makes them available on his website, www.gurufocus.com. This volume provides a highly readable synopsis of these principles, which points the reader to supporting tools on the website (many available only by subscription).

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to Lynch, Buffett, and Yachtman and their distinctive insights. The following nine chapters discuss analytic techniques based on these insights.

Chapter 2 presents deep value investing, buying companies that are selling for much less than their book value. While the technique worked for Buffett in his early years, it faces serious problems in a reliable estimate of book value, and the next four chapters present a series of techniques focused on identifying “good companies” and paying a fair price for them.

Chapter 7 revisits much of the “good company” ground from the negative perspective, highlighting techniques to identify companies that one ought to avoid.

For investors daunted by the analytic detail required in chapters 3 to 7, chapter 8 gives guidelines for passive investing (for example, index funds or high-dividend stocks).

A recurring theme throughout the entire book is assessing the value of a company, and chapter 9 provides a systematic context for the valuation techniques mentioned in isolation earlier. Chapter 10 reviews market fluctuations to regulate expectations of investors in terms of what can be expected.

The main audience for Invest like a guru is the armchair investor seeking help in guiding an individual investment strategy. The book is much less technical than many other investment guides, but its readers are expected to use the book in connection with the technical tools provided on the website, not to provide them with the detail they need to write their own spreadsheets. The readability of the volume will attract new users and help established ones make more effective use of the online resources.

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