Reddit reviews Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy

• The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Security Analysis - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• The Interpretation of Financial Statements - Benjamin Graham
  
  
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports - Howard Schilit
  
  
• Applied Value Investing - Joseph Calandro
  
  
• Analysis for Financial Management - Robert Higgins
  
  
• Margin of Safety - Seth Klarman
  
  
• Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings - Philip Fisher
  
  
• One Up On Wall Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• Beating The Street - Peter Lynch
  
  
• The Essays of Warren Buffett - Warren Buffett
  
  
• Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
  
  
• Buffett Beyond Value - Prem Jain
  
  
• Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• You Can Be A Stock Market Genius - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Little Book That Beats The Market - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• The Big Secret for the Small Investor: A New Route to Long-Term Investment Success - Joel Greenblatt
  
  
• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Leferve
  
  
• Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb
  
  
• Poor Charlie's Almanack - Charlie Munger
  
  
• Rediscovered Benjamin Graham - Janet Lowe
  
  
• The Theory of Investment Value - John Burr Williams
  
  
• Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger - Peter Bevelin
  
  
• Security Analysis and Business Valuation on Wall Street - Jeffrey Hooke
  
  
• Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investment - James Montier
  
  
• Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• The Dark Side of Valuation - Aswath Damodaran
  
  
• Financial Statements: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports - Thomas Ittelson
  
  
• Buyout - Rick Rickertsen
  
  
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini
  
  
• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics - Gary Belsky
  
  
• The Warren Buffett Way - Robert Hagstrom
  
  
• The Most Important Thing - Howard Marks
  
  
• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald
  
  
• Accounting For Value - Stephen Penman
  
  
• Distressed Debt Analysis - Stephen Moyer
  
  
• Bankruptcy Investing - Ben Branch
  
  
• The Vulture Investors - Hilary Rosenberg
  
  
• Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring - Stuart Gilson
  
  
• Distress Investing - Martin J Whitman
  
  
• The Aggressive Conservative Investor - Martin J Whitman

Great idea for a thread. On this topic, I would highly recommend Greenwald's Competition Demystified(http://www.amazon.com/Competition-Demystified-Radically-Simplified-Approach/dp/1591841801/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348343953&sr=1-1&keywords=competition+demystified) which discusses how to analyse the various sources of competitive moat with examples from different industries

Here's my example:

• Home alarm monitoring (ADT, Securitas Direct & Broadview - both now private):
  High switching costs for customers because the equipment is owned by the provider & must be ripped out if they want to switch. Not worth it to save a few dollars a month on monitoring fees.
  
  As Greenwald notes, switching costs for customers coupled with regional economies of scale often equals durable competitive advantage.
  
  Sales & installation related expenses constitute almost 80% of steady-state costs for an alarm monitoring business. Therefore sales & installation crew efficiency is of critical importance to the success of an alarm monitoring business. Locally dominant firms enjoy an advantage in this respect because their sales crews can make more sales and installation calls per day than competitors whose crews must spend more time driving between installations due to their relatively dispersed customer base.
  
  The result is stable / growing market share and reasonably high steady-state returns on tangible capital for the larger players.

Reading Competition Demystified right now - the list is definitely missing a business strategy book!

I don't know much about Intel particularly, but if you invested in them because they were building chips for the cloud, and now you're second guessing it because other companies have decided to do the same, then you're probably investing for the wrong reasons.

You should rarely invest in a company because it's the first to a market. If that market is even remotely promising—let alone profitable—there will undoubtedly be competition. And more often than not, that competition is better capitalized, has more resources, better tech, etc.

The market oftentimes gets caught up in these short term views—new tech, first mover, etc.—but they are not long term drivers of business success. Everyone can adopt any a piece of technology or a manufacturing process, so these "advantages" are often just a mirage.

I'd recommend reading Buffett's thoughts on "moats" as well as Greenwald's Competition Demystified, Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy and Nick Gogerty's The Nature of Value

Competition Demystified