How long does it take to read The Theory of Investment Value?
John Burr Williams
The Theory of Investment Value by John Burr Williams takes about 11 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 14 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1938. 613 pages, about 168,575 words.
23 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 1 minute |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This book was written as his dissertation paper during his Ph.D at Harvard. Williams sent The Theory of Investment Value for publication before he had won faculty approval for his doctorate. The work discusses Williams' general theory, as well as providing over 20 specific mathematical models; it also contains a second section devoted to case studies. Various publishers refused the work since it contained algebraic symbols, and Harvard University Press published The Theory of Investment Value in 1938, only after Williams had agreed to pay part of the printing cost. Williams was among the first to challenge the "casino" view that economists held of financial markets and asset pricing—where prices are determined largely by expectations and counter-expectations of capital gains [6] (see Keynesian beauty contest). He argued that financial markets are, instead, "markets", properly speaking, and that prices should therefore reflect an asset's intrinsic value.[7] (Theory of Investment Value opens with: "Separate and distinct things not to be confused, as every thoughtful investor knows, are real worth and market price...".) Developing this idea, Williams proposed that the value of an asset should be calculated using “evaluation by the rule of present worth”. Thus, for a common stock, the intrinsic, long-term worth is the present value of its future net cash flows—in the form of dividend distributions and selling price.
Subjects: Investments, Fundamental Analysis, Discounted Cash Flow
