Discerning and actionable investment advice.
An experienced investment professional shares 24 “best investor” strategies.
The typical investment book either doles out advice derived from a system created by the author or delves deeply into the plusses and minuses of specific, existing investment vehicles. Debut author and investment advisor Belchamber’s approach is refreshingly different: He’s studied some of the world’s most successful investors, distilling their strategies into a 12-chapter collection of insights, consolidated into a handy list at the book’s end. This concept gives the book strong organization and reinforces its credibility by drawing on the thoughts of multiple experts. Part I concentrates on the overall mindset of investors; to set up the theme, Belchamber appropriately quotes Benjamin Graham, mentor of Warren Buffett: “In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.” Much of the first part concerns the psychology of investment, augmented by useful examples of errors that investors make when they “chase the past,” engage in self-sabotage, and fail to understand the various types of risk. In Part II, Belchamber ably covers best practices, which include setting priorities, leveraging compound interest, using metrics, and gaining awareness of “investment myths and heresies.” Part III explores specific investment strategy, beginning with a basic premise overlooked “by almost everyone” except best investors, according to the author—that “preservation and growth go together,” even though they’re “normally regarded as separate options.” Here, the author outlines the specifics of money management, investment allocation, and consilience (“the principle of strength in numbers”). A number of charts and graphs helpfully illustrate the key concepts in this final section. Belchamber concludes that “Far too many investors end up taking too much risk, poorly allocated, and without effective active management.” His overall aim is to give investors tools to change their thinking, and his book is clear and straightforward. Novices may find portions of the material somewhat advanced, but experienced investors will likely glean much of value; in fact, it may very well lead them to a new approach to long-term investing.
Discerning and actionable investment advice.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1876-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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