The Aggressive Conservative Investor is a highly readable, no holds barred presentation of one of the most successful investment strategies. With painful honesty and terrific story-telling distressed investing and value legend Martin Whitman shows investors how to analyze and evaluate stocks just like controlling owners, the assumption being that the stock price rarely reflects the true value of the business (Lampert did this with Kmart when he analyzed the company's real estate portfolio to uncover more value than the company's revenues seemed to indicate). Illuminated by numerous case studies, Whitman and Shubik present risk-minimizing methods that also provide high reward if applied correctly. The long-term performance of Third Avenue Value Fund speaks for the success of the strategy with total returns of over 850% since 1990, and average annual returns of over 15%.