Book Bits |30 July 2016

Invest in the Best: Applying the principles of Warren Buffett for long-term investing success
By Keith Ashworth-Lord
Summary via publisher (Harriman House)
This book concentrates on the investment style of Business Perspective Investing, as practiced by Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett. It takes the reader through the realisation that the thought process involved when buying shares in a company is no different to buying the company in its entirety.

The “Peak Oil” Scare and the Coming Oil Flood
By Michael C. Lynch
Summary via publisher (Praeger)
Is the earth’s oil supply starting to run out, or is there far more oil than some experts believe? This book points out flaws in the research used to warn of an oil shortfall and predicts that large new reserves of oil are soon to be tapped. In the last decade, oil experts, geologists, and policy makers alike have warned that a peak in oil production around the world was about to be reached and that global economic distress would result when this occurred. But it didn’t happen. The “Peak Oil” Scare and the Coming Oil Flood refutes the recent claims that world oil production is nearing a peak and threatening economic disaster by analyzing the methods used by the theory’s proponents. Author Michael C. Lynch, former researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), debunks the “Peak Oil” crisis prediction and describes how the next few years will instead see large amounts of new supply that will bring oil prices down and boost the global economy.

Exchange-Traded Funds and the New Dynamics of Investing
By Ananth N. Madhavan
Summary via publisher (Oxford University Press)
In Exchange-Traded Funds and the New Dynamics of Investing, Ananth Madhavan examines the quiet transformation of asset management through the rise of passive or index investing. A closely-related phenomenon is the rise of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). An ETF is an investment vehicle that trades intraday and seeks to replicate the performance of a specific index. ETFs have grown substantially in size, diversity, and market significance in recent years. These trends have generated considerable interest, especially from retail and institutional investors and increasingly from academics, regulators and the press.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
By Gretchen Bakke
Summary via publisher (Bloomsbury)
America’s electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It’s not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources–solar, wind, and other alternatives–the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to re-imagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It’s a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way.