One Up on Wall Street, by Peter Lynch
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, by Roger Lowenstein
Value Investing With the Masters, by Kirk Kazanjian
The Davis Dynasty, by John Rothchild
Valuegrowth Investing, by Glen Arnold

Junior High

The 5 Keys to Value Investing, by J. Dennis Jean-Jacques
Beating the Street, by Peter Lynch
Investment Fables, by Aswath Damodaran
The Vest Pocket Guide to Value Investing, by C. Thomas Howard
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, by Philip Fisher

High School

Made in America, by Sam Walton
Forbes’ Greatest Investing Stories, by Richard Phalon
John Neff on Investing, by John Neff
The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham
The Money Masters, by John Train

University

Stocks for the Long Run, by Jeremy Siegel
Quality of Earnings, by Thornton Oglove
Investing in Small-Cap Stocks, by Christopher Graja and Elizabeth Ungar
The Book of Investing Wisdom, by Peter Krass
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, by Joel Greenblatt

Grad School

Break Up!, by Campbell, Koch & Sadtler
Investment Gurus, by Peter Tanous
Value Investing: A Balanced Approach, by Martin Whitman
Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond, by Bruce Greenwald
The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek

I keep getting sucked into all these Internet marketing ventures, ideas, and BS. I just have this ridiculous hope and dream of starting up some “auto-pilot” “quick cash earning” online Internet marketing business.

I have bought several eBook products over a span of about three years or so. It’s all hyped up, difficult, time-consuming garbage. They all feed into the human psyche. It’s amazing how skilled these marketers are. After all, they suckered ME into buying their crap time and time again.

In fact, probably the only real way to make money is to make a frickin eBook! Have you noticed how Internet marketers seem to copy everyone else? Their sales letters are all the same! They have the same elements. “Dear Friend” at the beginning. Testimonials scattered throughout. Big, bold red text screaming HOW I MADE 32,321,321 DOLLARS IN ONE MONTH. If you look closely at the numbers they use, it’s all randomly-typed-looking. They type it like 4,321 or like 3,468 or even 55,667. Get it? They also sell their product with a price tag that always ends with a 7. BUY IT FOR ONLY $27. $47. $97. $197. It’s ridiculous. I bet I could make a killing if I just copy a sales letter and change the names through out. I can do the same thing with the product itself by changing the chapters around, changing the names mentioned in the book, and changing the overall presentation and layout.

I may actually be onto something here. It was Picasso who said “Good artists imitate, great artists steal”. If I were a programmer, I would create an AI bot that can go around the ‘Net and scrape all kinds of content. It would copy all of the best sales letters automatically and throw them on a new domain and website. It would know how to generate free traffic. It would do all of this at the click of a button or the execution of a command.

The funny thing is, I have already seen sales letters advertising this same exact concept. It also seems like a lot of great concepts are out there, but when they are actually put into practice, they are garbage. They just don’t work like promised. These authors make claims that I never find to be true. They always claim that “if you create an AdWords campaign with this niche keyword list, and this Clickbank hoplink, you will have about $10 adspend, and 10 sales translating into $654 net income!” “Just multiply this 100 times over and you will make $6540 per day!”

Anyway, back to my point. I would love to just have an AI computer. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine executing a command like “Hello, neuron, how are you today?” and getting a response like “Hi Kevin, I am doing excellent. I earned you over $43,998,330.00 this week so far. I would like to purchase a new datacenter so I can expand my processing and learning capabilities to deliver more success for us”. My reply would of course be “Very nice, that’s a 2% revenue increase since last week. Please go ahead and get the ball rolling for a new datacenter right away. Oh, and can you donate half of last week’s earnings to the One Laptop Per Child project sometime today?”

It would be like talking to a person.  I would have neuron do everything for me. I would tell neuron to book the next 100 flights and hotels to the best 100 destinations. I would tell neuron to do all the boring administrative stuff like taking phone calls, writing email replies to clients, doing invoicing, and paying bills. I still dream of this kind of freedom. I want to be free of the shackles of daily work life. I want to have a better life for myself and my girlfriend. I am working hard towards this goal.

I already have something like this in the making. I am successful, very successful so far, with my computer business. The only problem is I am over-working, stressing out, and getting burned out of doing all the administrative tasks, driving in traffic, and dealing with repetitive stuff from clients at times. I can create this so-called “AI” empire where I have others do most of the work for me. This is what a REAL business is like. You have other people running the business FOR you.

So unless someone out there can convince me that you really can make $4,321 per day online, I think I’m going to stick with growing and expanding my successful computer business further. Perhaps someday I will have an army of human resources at my disposal, waiting at my side for any command I give them to get work done, revenue pouring in, and grow the business.

Comments are welcome.