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.
Start with Book One on AmazonSee all six booksRead free excerpts
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 (why they matter, and how to use one). 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.
Buy on Amazon What's on each page, and how it compares with the apps
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.
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.
Pieces of the method, published in full on this site. No signup, no email, nothing to join.
The introduction to Book One, in full.
What the discipline is, where the math stops and judgment starts, the six categories worth checking before you buy anything, and a working portfolio manager's Wednesday from start to finish.
Earnings can be engineered. Cash is harder to fake.
The formula, a worked example, the four ratios worth building on top of it, why two data providers will hand you different numbers for the same company, and the trap that still catches experienced investors.
Location beats pattern. Every time.
Candlestick anatomy, the single and multi-candle patterns worth knowing by name, the five other chart types and when each earns its place, and the mistake that turns chart reading into pattern collecting.
For the investor who owns the stock, it's a seatbelt.
What the pattern is and why it works, four drawing rules that disqualify most of what people point at, the volume rule, where the stop goes, the measured-move target with a worked example, the inverse version, and what to do when a stock you own forms one.
Bonds hedge a slowing economy. They don't hedge rising rates.
The discount-rate mechanism behind 2022, the difference between a growth scare and an inflation scare, the 25-year regime that got mistaken for a law, why duration made it worse, and the four adjustments that follow.
Two tries at the same price, then a break.
What the pattern is, why the time between the two tops is the judgment call that matters most, how level they need to be, the volume tiebreaker, the stop and the measured target, and the double bottom as an entry for the investor who buys rather than shorts.
Ten minutes of arithmetic and one hard feeling.
The two triggers and the hybrid a professional uses, a worked example in dollars, rebalancing with new contributions instead of sales, the order that keeps taxes down, the single-stock version of the problem, and the one case where restoring a weight is the wrong trade.
How much to buy, and where to get out.
The difference between invested and at risk, two position caps and which one wins when they disagree, where a stop actually belongs, the three stop layers, and the portfolio heat problem that catches careful investors.
Growth is worth paying for. Not at any price.
Two companies at the same P/E can be priced completely differently. Where Lynch's thresholds came from, why I now buy near 2.0 anyway, and the four situations where the ratio stops working.
"The curve inverted" is a headline, not an analysis.
What an inverted curve means, which spread to watch and why the Fed's own model uses a different one than the media, the three things hiding inside every yield, the four steepening patterns, why an uninverting curve is sometimes worse news than an inverted one, and whether any of it means you should sell.
Ten tech stocks is one bet with extra paperwork.
What correlation really requires, the four layers most investors skip three of, how sector labels disguise a single shared driver, and the two places diversification stops helping.
Every bull market manufactures geniuses.
Why one year proves almost nothing, how factor exposure masquerades as skill, the thousand coin flippers, and the five process questions that work when a track record cannot settle it.
A single DCF number is false precision.
The discounted cash flow formula, the four steps, a complete worked example from cost of equity through to an answer, and the sensitivity table showing how a three-point change in the discount rate moves the valuation 38%.
A price is the last transaction between two people.
Bid, ask, and what the quote really means, the four things that change what buyers will pay, why price is set at the margin by a fraction of holders, and why a falling price is not information about the business.
Reading a chapter and being able to use it are different skills.
Why fluency isn't retention, the five exercises in every workbook chapter and what each one tests, why the workbooks are separate from the books, how to work through one so it builds skill, and which workbook goes with which book.
Murphy, Graham, Lynch, and Bulkowski. Not a ranking.
What each of the four is for, who it suits, where it stops, and what the six books here add. Three of the four were on the author's shelf before he wrote a word.
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.
Mark S. Ballard spent 35 years at BankChampaign, N.A., a community bank in Champaign, Illinois, that he helped start and grow. While there, he founded the bank's Wealth Management business and spent decades managing client portfolios as a professional growth investor.
Mark's investment process has its roots in his master's graduate thesis, where he took the contrarian position against the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, arguing that the right set of financial ratios can consistently identify market-beating companies. That thesis became the foundation of the practitioner-first framework behind this series.
Mark earned a bachelor's degree in Accounting from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1983 and a master's degree in Accounting from Illinois State University in 1985. Born in Decatur, Illinois, he has lived in Champaign for more than 35 years and is currently semi-retired from BankChampaign, N.A.
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. Here is why they matter and how to use one.
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 come in Kindle and paperback editions. The workbooks and the journal are paperback only, because you write in them. 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.