It sometimes seems as if there were as many different investment styles in practice today as stocks in which to invest, with virtually every one of them--styles as well as stocks--offering varying levels of appeal to various people.

Professional investment consultant Peter J. Tanous has come to understand this after three decades in the field, and in Investment Gurus, he presents a wide range of tactics and strategies that have been developed by acknowledged stock-picking experts. At the heart of this book are Tanous's interviews with 18 top money managers and academics, including Mario Gabelli, William F. Sharpe, Peter Lynch, Laura J. Sloate, and Merton Miller.

The book concludes with "Your Roadmap to Wealth," which summarizes the success factors common to each of the money managers interviewed and suggests ways to develop an intelligent personal investment plan.

Can a smart money manager working from the outside revive a bankrupt company with his clients' massive capital and a sharp management agenda? Are "value" stocks better than "growth" stocks? Can anyone "beat the market"? Is volatility okay? What about the role of the Internet in trading? These and other questions vital to stock market investors are aired in this remarkable series of interviews with investment industry leaders by Tanous, whose firm, Lynx Investment Advisory, finds money managers for billion-dollar clients.

The author brings out the financial background, strategy and tactics of such mutual-fund miracle men as Fidelity Magellan's Peter Lynch ("what happens to the company... happens to the stock"); "momentum" trader Richard Driehaus ("look for earnings surprises") and "Super Mario" Gabelli, who champions "intrinsic private market value." Other big-name trader/managers also speak out freely here. In closing, the author constructs sample "portfolios" of guru-managed mutual funds for the reader's consideration.

Tanous's effort is far superior to the other collections of interviews with money managers. Most books of this sub-genre fall into two categories, depending on the author. The first type of author is usually a journalist who knows little about the disciplines of stock picking and running investment funds, and you are usually hard pressed to find any new insight in their books, because they don't know how to ask their subjects the really insightful questions. The second type, has a sophisticated investor/fund consultant doing the interviews, and can often produce real insight from the interviewees. The problem with many of these books, is that the author is often not trying to interview the successful money managers. Instead, authors are often trying to play gotcha! with their interviewees, subjecting them to asinine questions and frequently diverging from the topics that made you buy their book in the first place.

In contrast, Tanous knows how to ask questions that are of interest to professional and serious amateur investors, and he knows how to stay on topic. He does ask every interviewee about the efficient market hypothesis, but that's a theme of his book and can be excused. What you get from Tanous is an interviewer who knows how to ask really penetrating, really revealing questions of the world's best money managers, and the humility to realize that his readers don't want to know what he, Tanous, thinks, but what his interviewees think! What's more, he managed to get interviews with at least two money managers--Bruce Sherman of Private Capital Management and Scott Sterling Johnston of Sterling Johnston Asset Management--that have excellent track records but who speak very, very rarely to the press.

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