A Framework for the Modern Investor
Six books, their companion workbooks, and two tools to help you apply what you learn. Together they teach you to pick stocks, time your entries, read the economy, manage risk, and document your trades the way a professional portfolio manager does. Plain English. Formulas you can check. No stock tips.
You don't work on Wall Street. You have a retirement account, maybe a brokerage account, and at some point you bought a stock you couldn't fully explain to the person sitting next to you.
That's the reader this series was written for. It doesn't assume you know what a discounted cash flow is. It does assume you're an adult who is tired of buying on stories and would rather buy on evidence.
The process inside is the one Mark used for 44 years managing client portfolios: find a good business, confirm it's growing, refuse to overpay, wait for the market to agree, size the position so a mistake can't hurt you, and let the winners run. Each book covers one piece. Together they're the whole job.
Read the books in order; each assumes the one before it. Workbooks are optional and sit right after their book. The Financial Ratios Guide belongs beside Book One, and the Trading Journal beside Book Four.
What a business is worth, and how to tell.
Read a 10-K without drowning in it. Learn which financial ratios separate companies that compound from companies that just look cheap, and how a growth-at-a-reasonable-price screen keeps you from overpaying for either. Everything else in the series stands on this book.
Drill the valuation work from Book One until reading a balance sheet feels routine. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
Which numbers matter, what level signals trouble, and when a ratio is lying to you.
Every buy-or-avoid decision comes down to a handful of numbers pulled from the financial statements. This guide organizes the seven ratio categories that separate real business quality from an attractive multiple: valuation, profitability, growth, financial health, efficiency, cash flow, and risk-adjusted return. Each entry explains what the ratio measures, why it matters, and when to reach for it. A built-in case-study workbook, with a hundred-question exercise, fifty story problems, and a full company analysis, turns the framework into practice.
The market decides when it agrees with you.
Fundamentals tell you what a stock is worth. They don't tell you when other investors will notice. Charts, indicators, relative strength, and market breadth, taught with the skepticism they deserve, including worked examples of setups that failed.
Practice reading charts, spotting patterns, and judging indicators before real money is on the line. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
The economy sets the weather for every stock you own.
Interest rates, the yield curve, inflation, and the business cycle, and how each shows up in your portfolio months before it shows up in the news. Enough macro to protect you. Not so much that you start trading headlines.
Work through rate, inflation, and cycle scenarios and what each one does to a portfolio. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
Entries, exits, position size, and the discipline to follow them.
The mechanics of actually placing the trade: how much to buy, where the stop goes, when to add, and when to leave. Built around the same position-sizing rules Mark uses in his own process, with the reasoning behind each one.
Size positions, place stops, and plan entries and exits on paper first. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
Write the trade down before you make it.
A structured 8.5 by 11 journal built around the series' process: the thesis, the entry, the position size, the stop, and the review afterward. Every trader who keeps one learns the same thing: the notes catch mistakes the account statement never explains.
Individual stocks are the parts. This is the whole.
Diversification that means something, concentration that's earned, rebalancing, taxes, and how to build a portfolio that survives the years you're wrong.
Build and stress-test portfolios chapter by chapter. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
Coming soon on Amazon
Why smart investors still lose money, and what to do about it.
The behavioral traps that catch experienced investors, how to test whether you actually have an edge, and the risk management that keeps one bad year from erasing five good ones.
Test your own behavior against the traps that catch experienced investors. A quick recap, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, story problems, and a case study for every chapter.
The books follow a single framework: growth at a reasonable price, adapted from Peter Lynch and refined over 44 years of managing real portfolios. Read them in order, because each one assumes the one before it. Book One teaches you to value a business. Nothing later makes sense until you can.
Every book uses the same cast of fictional investors working through the same kinds of decisions you'll face, and not every example ends the way the thesis predicted. Some trades win for the wrong reason. Some sound processes lose. That's deliberate. A method you only see succeed is a method you don't understand yet.
No. The series is written at a plain-English reading level for adults who invest their own money. Every technical term is defined the first time it appears, and every formula is one you can check with a calculator. If you can read a bank statement, you can read these books.
In order, One through Six. Book One teaches you to value a business, and each later book assumes you can already do that. Readers who start with Technical Analysis or Trading Stocks tend to get less out of them because the fundamental screen that comes first is what tells you which stocks are worth charting or trading at all.
No. The series teaches a growth-at-a-reasonable-price process adapted from Peter Lynch, aimed at holding good companies for months and years. Book Four covers trade mechanics, position sizing, and stop placement, but as tools for entering and exiting long-term positions with discipline, not for trading in and out during the day.
Each book has a separate workbook with a quick recap, multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank drills, story problems, and a case study for every chapter. They exist for readers who want to prove to themselves they understood the material before they put money behind it. The books stand on their own; the workbooks are optional.
No. It teaches a repeatable process for finding, evaluating, buying, and managing stocks yourself. The companies used in worked examples are fictional. Nothing in the books or on this site is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
All six books, the companion workbooks, the Financial Ratios Guide, and the Trading Journal are sold on Amazon. The books and workbooks come in Kindle and paperback editions; the journal is paperback only. Every button on this page goes straight to the Amazon listing.
Book One teaches you what a business is worth. Read it first, then decide whether the rest of the series is for you.
