Pitch the Perfect Investment: The Essential Guide to Winning on Wall Street

Learn the overlooked skill that is essential to Wall Street success. 

Pitch the Perfect Investment combines investment analysis with persuasion and sales to teach you the "soft skill" so crucial to success in the financial markets. Written by the leading authorities in investment pitching, this book shows you how to develop and exploit the essential, career-advancing skill of pitching value-creating ideas to win over clients and investors. You'll gain world-class insight into search strategy, data collection and research, securities analysis, and risk assessment and management to help you uncover the perfect opportunity; you'll then strengthen your critical thinking skills and draw on psychology, argumentation, and informal logic to craft the perfect pitch to showcase your perfect idea. The ability to effectively pitch an investment is essential to securing a job on Wall Street, where it immediately becomes a fundamental part of day-to-day business. This book gives you in-depth training along with access to complete online ancillaries and case studies so you can master the little skill that makes a big difference.

It doesn't matter how great your investment ideas are if you can't convince anyone to actually invest. Ideas must come to fruition to be truly great, and this book gives you the tools and understanding you need to get it done.

• Persuade potential investors, clients, executives, and employers
• Source, analyse, value, and pitch your ideas for stocks and acquisitions
• Get hired, make money, expand your company, and win business
• Craft the perfect investment into the perfect pitch

Money managers, analysts, bankers, executives, salespeople, students, and individual investors alike stand to gain massively by employing the techniques discussed here. If you're serious about success and ready to start moving up, Pitch the Perfect Investment shows you how to make it happen.

About the Authors

Paul D. Sonkin is an analyst and portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds and previously spent 14 years at the helm of The Hummingbird Value Fund. For 16 years he was an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and is coauthor of Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond.

Paul Johnson runs Nicusa Investment Advisors and is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University. He is a contributing annotator to The Most Important Thing Illuminated (by Howard Marks), co-author of The Gorilla Game, and a contributing author to Columbia Business School: A Century of Ideas.

Reviews

"Pitching stocks is a dark art. What begins with meticulous research, cold and rational analysis, and clear judgment, must then become seduction. Sonkin and Johnson explain this alchemy in wonderful detail. They've structured their book around an unappreciated key to success in finance: Nothing is as important to landing your first job, and then thriving there, as pitching the perfect investment." —Jeff Gramm, Portfolio Manager, Bandera Partners, and author of Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

"It is rare that you get a book on finance that is fun to read, immensely informative, and deeply insightful. Sonkin and Johnson have pulled off the trifecta in this book." —Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance, NYU Stern School of Business and author of Investment Valuation and Narrative and Numbers

"My decades of experience have taught me that pitching is a vital skill one must master to succeed on Wall Street. Sonkin and Johnson's book gives someone new to the industry a significant head start in obtaining this skill." —Regina Pitaro, Head of Institutional Marketing, GAMCO Asset Management, Inc. and author of Deals ... Deals ... and More Deals

"Sonkin and Johnson's explanations of market efficiency, the wisdom of crowds, and security valuation set a benchmark for clarity and practicality." —Scott E. Page, Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics, The University of Michigan, and author of The Difference and The Diversity Bonus

"Pitch the Perfect Investment provides the toolkit to build conviction in your analysis and effectively articulate how it should be implemented. Sonkin and Johnson follow their own advice with concise and persuasive principles. Their guidance will neutralize the intimidation factor in pitching a portfolio manager and allow the analyst to shine." —Bruce Geller, CEO of DGHM & Co., LLC

"Communicating investment research in a thoughtful manner is both art and science, which Sonkin and Johnson masterfully teach in Pitch the Perfect Investment." —John Mihaljevic, Managing Editor, The Manual of Ideas

Dimensions: 16 x 3.56 x 23.11 cm