Review Of “The Defensive Value Investor” Book By John Kingham

In his first book “The defensive value investor” John Kingham gives detail presentation and explanation of the eclectic approach that combine ideas of deep value, high quality, dividend and moat-oriented investing styles. The author illustrates how to obtain necessary numbers in numerous examples of UK equities traded in London Stock Exchange, but his ideas are applicable to US and probably other countries stocks. The proposed method itself is the result of trial-and-error journey of the author he began in 2011. John Kingham has good ability to learn from mistakes and reduce his observations to simple and mostly useful rules of thumb (although some of them should be taken with grain of salt IMO).

Even if you are not going to become a defensive value investor you should read at least two chapters of this good book ” Value traps” (ch. 7) and “Sell deliberately” (ch. 13). The longest in the book chapter 7 outlines possible causes of corporate crisis situations I have never read before in investing books and represents them in good questionnaire. The chapter 13 touches the topic usually underrepresented in investing books and reflects quite thought through rules of thumb any equity investor should consider.

Overall I believe that this book was useful for me and hopefully will be useful for other investors.