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When a friend suggested I read “What’s Behind the Numbers” I quietly made a point to avoid it all costs. I love thinking and philosophizing about markets, but a book about numbers is the last way I’d like to approach the subject, not to mention about the most sleep inducing.Fortunately, “What’s Behind the Numbers” is as good as it is mis-titled. This is not a technical trading book and it's not even that esoteric. It's certainly not dry. Who knows what makes a book sell, but more accurate titles might have been “How To Analyze the Way Others Want You To Think” or “What You Want To Believe Versus What’s True”. The title, "What's Behind the Numbers" gave me a misguided first impression.This book would be a worthy introduction to how stock markets really work for those of you interested on an intellectual level. For those reading the book as a learning tool for money management (probably most of the audience) I’d say “What’s Behind the Numbers” offers as good an explanation to value investing in the old school Buffet way as you’re going to get. Don’t “blow up” by buying overpriced and overhyped stocks and your returns will take care of themselves. When a company is trying hide its true status like the Great and Powerful Oz with all his pageantry, that’s the time to pull the curtain back and look for a possible short. Value investing is by no means the only way to manage your money in the stock market, but as the book rigorously defends in its early chapters, this strategy has proven to be among the most solid through the years.Yes, the book does look at and teach numbers - after all, numbers are the tool for measuring the market, not just for technical traders but for old school fundamentals traders too. But the insight of “What’s Behind the Numbers” is that it shows not just what accounting numbers mean on their face (though this is important), but that these numbers are inseparable from the motivations and propaganda techniques of the companies who generate them. How valuable is a projected EPS for four years in the future? And why would such an estimate even be employed. Why would a company process and account tomorrow’s sales today? Yes, sales numbers are very important but so are the numbers of things not sold - otherwise known as inventory. When it comes to the stock market lying is not allowed. But, as “What’s Behind the Numbers” points out, kinda sorta lying is.From an almost philosophical standpoint I greatly appreciate how thoroughly and unflinchingly the book acknowledges market risk. As an example, you will frequently hear about a fund’s amazing track record or its alluring return since inception. But, this statistic obfuscates the enormous fluctuations a fund may journey through to get to that number. And probably more importantly, certainly more humanly, the book reminds you of the toll of stress and fear that accompanies these fluctuations and its inevitable result - you will take your money out of the fund. (The book cites the CGM Focus Fund, run by Ken Heebner and, if my memory serves, almost nobody stayed in that fund from its inception to last year when “What’s Behind the Numbers” was published. The fund showed great numbers but it was more suited to robots than humans.)Another water cooler statistic the book cites that frequently gets our blood flowing but can easily lead to heartbreak upon personal application is the S&P itself (or any major index for that matter). A huge increase in the S&P over a course of years sounds very tempting indeed, but this gain in the S&P far from guarantees that the stock you would have bought would have gone up in that time (some statistics say it probably would not have), that you wouldn’t have sold early to realize a profit, or that you wouldn’t have shrewdly played the contrarian and shorted when prices got too high - only to seem them get higher.Value investing is a market strategy that effectively measures and deals with risk. That’s sounds simple enough, but there are several steps beyond this that I was happy to see addressed in “What’s Behind the Numbers”.First, how are these numbers really generated? What laws, what accounting techniques, which market forces all set the parameters for what the numbers can amount to. And second, what do the people behind the numbers (and, again, the numbers are the alleged measurement of risk) really want you to believe ? (Hint: it’s not the long term. And frequently it’s not even the truth).If all of this seems esoteric than perhaps you will appreciate the book’s title, “What’s Behind the Numbers” a bit more than I do. However, for myself, that’s just the point. I consider the manipulation of believe to be such an elemental aspect of all markets that I see this book as covering essential and basic territory! The fact that this territory is left out of many market “How To” books is to their detriment. “What’s Behind the Numbers” should be among your first market reeds. This is both a basic and advanced book, but my enthusiasm for it comes from the fact that it is an insightful and clear book - not just about numbers, but about how and why people use numbers to influence our market choices.