First-time SIC participants ask for a reading list in roughly the first 72 hours after intake. The Editorial Desk maintains a short one. We resist the temptation to make it longer. The list below is what the program desk actually hands out for S15.
Three books, in order
- The Intelligent Investor · Benjamin Graham (revised 2003 edition). Read chapters 8 and 20. Skip the rest on first pass. Mr. Market and the margin-of-safety framework are the entire intellectual core of the Senior Division rubric.
- Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits · Philip Fisher. Read the fifteen-point scuttlebutt checklist. This becomes the spine of any company-level primary research you do in S15.
- The Essays of Warren Buffett · Cunningham edition, 5th. Read sections II and III only. You are not training to become Buffett. You are training to read shareholder letters as primary sources.
That is the entire core list. We do not add a fourth book.
Two transcripts to read this week
If you have one hour, skip the books and read these two primary sources instead:
- Berkshire Hathaway annual letter, latest year. Read the section on operating earnings and intrinsic value. Take note of how Buffett does not compare to benchmarks.
- Any Q4 earnings transcript from a company you think you understand. Read the prepared remarks. Then read the Q&A. The gap between the two is where most SIC theses live or die.
“Reading two transcripts well beats reading twenty newsletters poorly. The rubric rewards depth, not coverage.”
What not to read
The program desk explicitly recommends against the following during your first SIC season:
- Daily financial news aggregators. They generate volume, not insight, and they crowd out primary-source reading time.
- Stock-picking newsletters. The Senior Division rubric scores down theses that pattern-match published recommendations.
- Backtesting platforms. They are useful for professionals; for SIC participants they tend to substitute correlation work for the reasoning the rubric grades.
One framework to internalize
Before you write your first thesis, read any one serious DCF tutorial, end to end. We do not mandate a specific one. The point is not to learn a model. The point is to internalize that every valuation requires you to make four assumptions in public — growth, margin trajectory, terminal value, discount rate — and to defend each one.
Senior teams who can not articulate their four assumptions when asked rarely clear the rubric’s Risk Articulation axis.
For the curious
The full extended bibliography lives on the Resources page. Use it after S15 closes, not before. The short list above is what you actually need for one season.
— SIC Editorial Desk · S15 reading list