Margin of Safety
Buffett's letters, anything Lynch wrote, or Neff.
Fortune's Formula.
Anything by Damodaran, that should go in the beginner's Finance/investing pile, his stuff is the nuts.
You are very highly over-rating Ritholtz, I can find 2 factual errors in any of his longer blog posts, 3 if I read carefully. His 'economic' research isn't remotely top-notch, I can't think of one major buy-side investor who would agree with you on that.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/commen...celerat-1.html
Barry once again makes his consistent error* of comparing NSA-figures to SA-figures, as he does in his rant on this topic consistently. That's like comparing retail sales in March with Easter to retail sales in March without Easter. A straight comparison gives you a nonsensical answer.
And saying he was the only bear is LOL_tastic, try Jeremy Grantham, or John Hussman [or Ray Dalio] or a cast of thousands but those 2-3 put out very, very well-written weekly/monthly pieces that are head and shoulders above. Any number of well-known economists, buy-side analysts, and investors had turned bearish on housing by mid- 2005 or earlier, such as Steve Mandel and Ken Heebner, just to name 2.
Peter Schiff was bearish on the US and housing as well -- and his clients lost 50%+ last year. One call about one industry is meaningless.
Another good source of bearish thinking would be David Rosenberg.
Try GaveKal or Ed Hyman for actual top-notch research.
* Still think the B-D model somehow skews the data? Then don't use it. We have another, wider, employment series, the household survey.
m/m chg
3 mo avg 12 mo avg
payrolls -331 -478
Household -322 -463
So, even with the B/d adjustment, the survey of actual citizens shows
lower unemployment trends than the adjusted payrolls.
Payrolls ignore firms under 50 employees, which doesn't sound bad unless you know that startups have created 3mm jobs annually, on average, for the past 30 years.
Two Plus Two
Linear Mode
