Investing and Personal Finance
From the category archives:
I recently picked up Rob Carrick’s new book “Rob Carricks’s Guide to What’s Good, Bad and Downright Awful in Canadian Investments Today“. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Rob Carrick, he is the top personal finance journalist in Canada. You can read his articles in the business section of the Globe and Mail. [...]
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There are a few books that are beloved and can be a bit dangerous to review. YMOYL is the bible to a number of people, so I’ll start with saying that I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there, it’s a solid book and just about everyone should read it. In spite of [...]
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“Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is a book about how presenting choices in a different way can lead to widely differing proportions of people making each selection. At the very beginning they present an experiment where a nutritionist running cafeterias wanted to provide student with the [...]
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I’ve seen almost every Michael Moore documentary. I like his movies and I like his persona (he seems like he’d be a lively guest at a dinner party). I certainly don’t agree with all his politics (but, then, I can’t think of anyone I *do* agree with all their politics). Recently Preet did an interview [...]
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I loved the original Freakonomics book and was excited when I first saw that Levitt and Dubner had released SuperFreakonomics. I received it as a late Christmas gift and tore through it in a couple of days. From a high level, I’d say if you liked the first book, and are willing to read more [...]
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Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “What the Dog Saw” is different from his previous books. Whereas he took a core idea and expanded it to book length in Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink, in this book he collects a number of articles he had previously written for “The New Yorker”. A number of times I’ve [...]
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I was surprised recently when the Canadian Capitalist posted a “first impressions” review of Derek Foster’s new book, “Stop Working too: You Still Can!” I was surprised because I’ve reviewed two of Derek’s previous books (Lazy Investor and Money for Nothing – which includes an interview) and have mentioned him favourably a number of times [...]
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A friend gave me a copy of “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho and it’s one of the few books that I’ve liked well enough to keep in my personal library (I move a lot, so I try to keep the weight to a minimum). I’m not usually into “personal motivation” style books, however this book [...]
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I recently finished Atul Gawande’s “Better” and found it interesting and relevant to the personal finance world. Dr. Gawande is a practising surgeon and in this book discusses how to improve (get “better”) as an individual, organization and industry. He uses medicine as the domain of discussion, but manages to generalize his insights to universal [...]
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“Sway” by the brothers Ori and Rom Brafman is about “the irresistible pull of irrational behavior”. It was passed along to me after a friend enjoyed it and thought I would as well (which I did). It’s a fast, easy read in the style of a Malcolm Gladwell book or Freakonomics. The authors talk about [...]
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“Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert provides an accessible overview of Dr. Gilbert’s work at Harvard in the field of psychology. It is written in a style similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Levitt, taking interesting concepts and playfully exploring the consequences and justifications of them. Gilbert’s central idea in the book is [...]
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In John Reed’s “How to Write, Publish & Sell Your Own How-To Book” he refers to Dan Poynter’s work repeatedly. In my review of that book, Tim from Canadian Dream also directed me to Poynter, so when my local library had a copy of his “Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books” I had to check [...]
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“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” is far and away the best sales / marketing book I’ve ever read. Truth be told, it’s close to the only sales / marketing book I’ve found to have been worth my time to read (off the top of my head the only other two I could name would be [...]
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397 ways to save money” is a book written by Kerry K. Taylor, also known as the Squawk behind Squawkfox.com – one of my favourite blogs. Kerry was kind enough to send me an advance copy of her book and I’m glad she did because it is a really good book. I have to admit [...]
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The Canadian financial press has been very kind to Four Pillars, so I was excited when Power Publishers offered us a review copy of Jonathan Chevreau’s new book “Findependence Day”. Most Canadians interested in personal finance already know Jonathan Chevreau from his column in the Financial Post. While Mr. Chevreau has written previous books on [...]
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“Die Broke” by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine has been on my “to read” list for a while, and I finally got around to checking it out from the library. It was published in 1997, so it should be easy to find a copy at the library or a used copy. I was impressed [...]
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I first heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Outliers: The Story of Success” about a month ago and was delighted that he was putting out a new book. I was wildly enthusiastic about “Blink” and “The Tipping Point” and after reading an extract online I couldn’t wait. By a happy coincidence, a friend gave me [...]
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Today is Remembrance Day. Regardless of what you think of the military, foreign policy, and violence in general, I think its a wonderful chance to reflect on the young men (and women) who have risked, and sometimes lost, their lives in service to their countries. There are a few books on finance that are must [...]
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Derek Foster is the author of “STOP WORKING: Here’s How You Can!”, “The Lazy Investor”, and most recently “Money for Nothing: And Your Stocks for FREE”. When I happened to stop by his website recently, I was surprised that there was a new book posted there (I enjoyed both his previous books but I hadn’t [...]
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I’d come across a few references to Phil Town’s “Rule #1″ and finally decided to pull it out of the library and give it a read. The rule #1 referred to in the title is Warren Buffett’s idea that the most important rule of investing is “never lose money”. Mr. Town promises a “simple strategy [...]
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