The Little Book That Beats the Market
Greenblatt distills value investing into the 'Magic Formula': rank by earnings yield and return on capital, buy the top-ranked, hold for a year, repeat. Simple enough for a child to follow, yet it historically outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. The reason it works is the reason most people won't follow it — it requires patience during the inevitable stretches when it underperforms.
Greenblatt's backtest dazzled; the formula's live results since publication have been far more ordinary, which is what tends to happen once a strategy is printed in a bestseller. The escape hatch (it only fails because you lacked patience) is unfalsifiable by design. And the gum-store framing, written for his children, gets cloying by chapter three.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
