Warren Buffett: Read These 10 Books if You Want to be Rich

I read every book in the Omaha Public Library in business by the time I was 11. We moved back here, and as soon as I got back here and my dad was in Congress, I said, "Get everything in the Library of Congress. I want to read it!" But I still spend five or six hours a day reading. I mean, you can learn so much. I particularly love biography, just, you know, to be able to live the lives of these people that have been so extraordinary—the lessons and the discouragements they faced, just everything about it. So, I did; you can't get enough of reading.

Today, we're diving into 10 books recommended by Warren Buffett to expand your reading list. For someone who is as successful as him, you would not expect Warren Buffett to have a lot of time to catch up on his reading. However, an increasingly well-known fact about the Oracle of Omaha is that he would read 600, 750, or even a thousand pages a day when he began his career as an investor. Even now, the world's most successful investor has a habit of spending 80 percent of his day reading. So, what could be a better way to get into the mind of the most successful investor of our time than doing what he does most of the time?

We're going to take a look at a comprehensive list of books this prolific reader recommends that everybody should read. To gather this list, I combed through countless interviews and writings from Buffett to generate this list. Numbers five and six are my personal favorites! Enjoy!

Number one on the list is The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. No list of Warren Buffett recommended books would be complete without The Intelligent Investor as number one on that list. The story is Warren Buffett was 19 when he picked up a copy of Ben Graham's The Intelligent Investor, a book highlighting the basics of value investing and written by the father of value investing. It's clearly one of the best books on this list. Buffett regards it as one of the luckiest moments of his life. It helped him develop the intellectual framework he has in his approach to investing. The words of the legendary Wall Streeter struck him deeply in this investment book and helped shape his investing career. So, while things have definitely changed since Buffett first read this book, he still recommends chapters 8 and 20 as important reads for all investors, regardless of their age and experience level.

Number two on the list is Security Analysis by Ben Graham and David Dodd. While The Intelligent Investor was written for a more general audience, Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd was tailored more towards professional investors. Warren Buffett considers himself to have been fortunate to have both Ben Graham and David Dodd as his teachers back when he was at Columbia University. He highly recommends the investing book co-authored by these two geniuses. He said that this book provided him with "a road map for investing that I have been following for 57 years." The core insight of this book is that if your analysis is well thought out, you can understand the value of a company and whether the market realizes the same thing. Buffett regards Graham as the second most influential figure in his life after his father.

Next up is Poor Charlie's Almanac. This book is a collection of advice from the great Charlie Munger, who is the vice chairman of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. While not as well-known as Buffett, Charlie Munger has definitely gained quite the loyal following over the years. This book is named in reference to one of the most popular books of all time, Poor Richard's Almanac, written by one of Charlie Munger's idols, Ben Franklin. Poor Charlie's Almanac encapsulates information about the life of Charlie Munger as well as his sought-after philosophical views regarding investing and the conversations Munger had at Berkshire Hathaway meetings. It is a deeply insightful look into one of the geniuses in the world of stock market investing in a book Warren Buffett reads himself.

Number four on the list is a book titled Where the Customers' Yachts. In his 2014 shareholder letter, Warren Buffett recommends reading this book. Of course, this is not the first time he praised this all-time great book. Back in 2006, Warren Buffett said, "This is the funniest book ever written about investing!" It delivers many truly important messages on the subject. This book reveals the hypocritical nature of Wall Street. The author talks about a story of a visitor to New York who admires the yachts owned by brokers and bankers. He then ponders where the yachts of all the customers went. After all, they did follow the advice of their bankers and brokers; they should be able to afford them, right?

Number five on the list is one of my personal favorites, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Phil Fisher. Buffett describes this book as one of his favorite investing books of all time. He credits this book and its author, Phil Fisher, with helping him move away from the classic Ben Graham style of buying bad businesses for less than their liquidation value to buying great companies to hold for the long term. In this book, Phil Fisher talks about the importance of not just focusing on the financial statements of a company when investing but also focusing on the intangible characteristics, such as the company's management and the competitive advantages certain companies have. This book is an all-time classic and something everyone who's interested in business and investing should read. You don't have to be a professional investor to understand the book either; it is written in a way that is understandable to a person without a background in finance.

So now that we are halfway through the list, I think it's a good time to take a moment and say I appreciate you watching this video. If you want to learn more about investing, make sure to subscribe to the channel because this community has grown to over 50,000 people and would be even better with you as a part of it. So let's jump back into the countdown!

Next up on the list is The Outsiders by William Thorndike. This is the book that I'm currently reading and it has quickly become one of my favorite books of all time. This book helps you better understand how successful CEOs run a business—an absolutely critical skill when analyzing a potential investment. Buffett had even higher praise for the book, saying, "The Outsiders is an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation." Berkshire Hathaway has a significant part to play in the book, with an entire chapter dedicated to understanding the company and why Buffett has been so successful as the CEO. There's also a chapter in the book on one of Berkshire's directors, Tom Murphy, who Buffett regards as "overall the best business manager I've ever met." The book brilliantly captures the successful patterns from executives from the best performing companies of all time. The popular business publication Forbes magazine recommends this book as one of the most important business books in America.

Number seven on the list is Business Adventures: 12 Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brooks. So even though this book was written in 1969, it truly has stood the test of time. Buffett previously referred to this book as the greatest business book ever written. Business Adventures is a compilation of 12 stories previously published in the New Yorker, where Brooks was a staff writer, about some of the most important events in 20th-century corporate America. Each profile is a fascinating account of how a certain moment in history shaped an entire company. But what truly makes this book so brilliant is that it can appeal to readers who aren't even interested in the nature of finance. It offers a goldmine of lessons about people and life—our instinctive behaviors and what makes us succeed and fail.

Next up is The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Jack Bogle, another one of Warren Buffett's recommended books from his 2014 shareholder letter. This work by Jack Bogle is a fantastic collection of advice on index funds. Jack Bogle is the founder of Vanguard, one of the largest investment management companies in the world and a pioneer in the field of index fund investing. Arguably, it's the best book on the list of Warren Buffett's recommended books. Warren Buffett recommends reading this book instead of listening to the advice of most financial advisors you might come across. The book is based on the experience of Jack Bogle as he worked with Vanguard clients. If you know anything about Buffett, you know that he recommends for the average person to invest in index funds. The book attempts to help its readers use index fund investing to amass wealth and build their net worth. The charts and stats in the book are balanced with advice on index fund investing and fun anecdotes, making it an interesting read.

Number nine on the list is a book titled The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks. Another one of Buffett's suggested books is written by Howard Marks, the chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management. Marks is a pretty accomplished and respected investor in his own right. He was initially planning to wait until he retires before he published this book. Buffett admired Marks's client memos so much that he told Marks that he would write a review for his book if he decides not to wait too long to publish it. Warren Buffett must have really wanted people to read this book. Buffett describes this book as "a rarity, a useful book." In this book, Marks aims to help investors succeed by making well thought out decisions. He drew inspiration from his own mistakes and the lessons he learned from them, so his readers can know better.

Number ten on the list is The Clash of the Cultures, another book written by Jack Bogle. If you couldn't tell already, Buffett is a huge fan of the late Jack Bogle. The last of the Buffett book recommendations is one that he brought up in his 2012 shareholder letter. In the book, Bogle argued that short-term speculation is crowding out long-term investing. It is an insightful and interesting read with several practical tips for investors on how to build their investment strategy. It offers ten complete and actual steps that investors from all walks of life can take. He acknowledges in his book that his words "may not be the best strategy ever devised, but the number of strategies that are worse is infinite." It is a book worth reading and one that Warren Buffett reads himself.

So there we have it! Make sure to leave a comment and let me know if you have read any of these books before. Also, make sure to subscribe to the channel because it is my goal to make you a better investor by studying the world's greatest investors. See you in the next video!