Historic, Educational, Biographical, Comic & Esoteric

Invest Your Way to Financial Freedom

Invest Your Way to Financial Freedom, by Ben Carlson and Robin Powell, sets out to simplify the complex world of personal finance – and achieves this goal. The authors focus on the value of time, and stress the importance of savings over specific investment strategy. It covers the basics of investing – financial planning, asset allocation, tax incentives – but always comes back to the central themes of time and savings. These are important messages to get into the hands of people ...

Share Power

In 'Share Power: How ordinary people can change the way that capitalism works – and make money too', author Merryn Somerset Webb tells readers how to make capitalism work for all of us by following six simple recommendations. To read ShareSoc Director Cliff Weight's thoughts on this release, please click here.

How the World Really Works

It is important for investors, and indeed for everyone, to understand what factors are driving the world’s economies. This is particularly so when there are concerns about global warming and the degradation of the environment as the world’s population continues to increase. A good primer on this subject is a recently published book by Prof. Vaclav Smil entitled “How the World Really Works”. The author covers wide ranging topics from energy supply to food supply in a very analytic way based on ...

Where are the customers’ yachts?

A Book to Cheer You Up We are in one of those depressing moments of the manic-depressive cycles of the stock market. Invest-ability just told us that the FTSE 250 has now lost over 7 per cent this month and I can quite believe it with my portfolio certainly heading downhill. With the gloom of winter fast arriving, I can only recommend the book “Where are the customers' yachts?” by Fred Schwed. This book was first published in 1940 and the author had ...

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Review by Roger Lawson Avoiding buying into the peak of booms and selling at the bottom of a bust is one of key skills of any investor. But what causes them? The recently published book entitled “Boom and Bust” by academics William Quinn and John D. Turner attempts to answer that question by a close analysis of historical market manias. I found it a rather slow read to begin with but it proved to be a very thorough and interesting review of the ...

Baruch – My Own Story

340 pages, Hardcover £15.16, Paperback £16.99 Someone on Twitter recently mentioned Bernard Baruch as a legendary investor. I have just read his autobiography which is entitled “Baruch – My Own Story” and it is indeed interesting for several reasons. Firstly he had a long life and the book covers the period from the American civil war until the 1960s. So it covers more than one period of financial crisis such as the 1929 Wall Street crash and two World Wars. Baruch’s father was a ...

Keep Calm and Carry On: Good Advice for Hard Times

160 pages, Paperback from £7.34 This month we don't have a review of a weighty tome on stock market investment, but one more in tune with the public mood and recent events. Keep Calm and Carry On, subtitled "Good Advice for Hard Times" is simply a compendium of sayings to reinforce a stoic attitude, or lift your spirits. It has sections on Economists, Speculation, The Crunch, Big Business, Banking, Money and Debt, so it is ideal for the stock market investor when you are ...

The Little Book of Behavioural Investing

236 pages, Paperback from £7.34 (Amazon), £13.29 (Kindle) This very readable book is packed with examples of how easily we let our innate tendencies mislead us in investing, as well as with suggestions for overcoming them. The enemy in investing is specifically the parts of the brain known as the amygdala, the “reptilian” brain stem that allows us to react without thinking when a snake strikes at us. Montier calls this part of the brain the X-system - this is the “fear and ...

The Rational Optimist

448 pages, Paperback £9.99 (Amazon) Why review this book which has been recently published. Surely it’s a bit off the investment scene? Well apart from the fact that the forecast for world economic growth the author foresees should give us all bumper stock market returns going forward, he was also the former Chairman of Northern Rock (he seems not to mention that these days and has even dropped his title of “Dr” from the book sleeve). Let me say first this is the ...

Debtonator: How Debt Favours the Few and Equity Can Work For All of Us

Amazon hardback £7.03, Kindle £5.63. Now here’s a book well worth reading on your summer holidays. It’s called Debtonator by Andrew McNally. Indeed if you are taking a long-haul flight to your holiday destination, you might be able to read it in one sitting. Like all good books it is short at only 98 pages excluding notes and index, and the format is small as well. But there is an enormous amount of information embodied in there. It covers the problems caused by ...

The Deals of Warren Buffett – Volume 1: The First $100m

242 pages. £25, Amazon from £16.97, Kindle £15.60. The book covers the period from 1941, when the 11-year old Buffett bought 3 shares in Cities Service Preferred for himself and his sister with some $120 saved from paper rounds and reselling lost golf balls, up to 1978, by when the 48-year old Buffett had achieved personal net worth of $100m. After an initial scene-setting chapter, the book looks at some 22 of the deals that helped get him there, with the lessons ...

Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, from Jesse Livermore to Warren Buffett & beyond

243 pages. £24.99, Amazon from £14.17, Kindle £15.59. He writes with a light style so it’s an easy read – eight to ten pages on each of his chosen investors, some with familiar names (Warren Buffett, Anthony Bolton, Nick Train) but others much less so, to the UK reader at least – Georges Doriot (venture capital pioneer), Robert Wilson (early short seller), Edward Thorp (early quant), Jack Bogle (pioneer index investor). Each chapter has a brief biography which includes a note on ...