My brother recently asked me what he should read to gain some knowledge on investing. I wrote up some quick recommendations and thought I’d share them here in case other people had the same concern but maybe didn’t know who to ask or what to ask.
Below you’ll find a very short list of resources that can help you develop a better understanding on how investments work and how to manage your own money appropriately. This is not comprehensive and by no means will it make you a specialist, but the recommendations below will get you on the right path.
1) My Dad always recommended How to Make Money in Stocks by William J O’Neal, it’s in its third edition now I think. That provides one approach to investing for the long term. The author went on to set up another great news source called Investor’s Business Daily so if you can’t make it to the library, go to investors.com and you’ll be able to find some good information there.
2) Gerald Loeb’s Guide to Investment Survival is also a very easy read and still relevant and hits a lot of major points but keeps the trading ideas to a minimum.
3) For general investment / using money appropriately, Kevin O’Leary has a series of books and all are informative. Start with his first one, Cold Hard Truth: On Business, Money & Life.
4) Long-time financial guru Andrew Horowitz puts out a free podcast every week called The Disciplined Investor podcast in which he analyzes the markets and interviews other financial people to gain a better understanding of what’s going on in the markets.
5) On the Canadian side, BNN Bloomberg hosts Larry Berman, an ETF manager who has his own show every Monday morning titled Berman’s Call. Highly informative though he concentrates mostly on using ETFs to invest.
6) Finally, there are several reports available for free from Pat McKeough’s TSI Network (www.tsinetwork.ca/reports/). The website itself has quite a bit of information but if you want something quick to download and read on your phone, then the two PDFs I recommend are “How to Invest” and “Wealth Management”.
Overall, unless you’re looking to get into active trading (like options and related trading ideas), there really isn’t that much to learn. Start with the above list and then see where your interest lies. At the very least you’ll be a little bit more wise when you go to talk to your financial advisor (if you have one).
And one thing I should add is that you should be focused on your money, not the news. There are a lot of publications out there and lots of information but you don’t need to read that stuff in order to learn how to manage your own money.