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12 STEPS TO YOUR FIRST STOCK

HOW TO TURN 1 MONTH OF EXPENSES INTO 1 YEAR OF FREEDOM

A well-crafted, easy-to-follow seminar on long-term investment.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

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A beginner’s guide to investing in the stock market.

Debut author Hauptfuhrer offers a brief, accessible personal-finance tutorial designed for the first-time investor who has no knowledge of the field. Specifically, he offers counsel for long-term speculation, with the goal of transforming an amount of money that could pay for a month’s worth of expenses into a year’s worth. To that end, he advises the reader to think like a committed consumer and identify a product “addiction”—a purchasable item that he or she consistently, repeatedly buys—and then consider investing in the company that makes that product. He then lays out the basics for assessing the company’s future prospects for success, analyzing everything from its current profitability to the strength of its CEO. For a long-ball investor, he says, the point is to buy and hold, studiously refraining from micromanaging one’s stock holdings. This “stupidly simple strategy maximizes dollars-per-hour while minimizing taxes, fees, and stress,” he writes, effectively highlighting the strength of amateur investing, which is having the luxury of patience. Indeed, the whole point is to do as little as possible, so there’s no real incentive to hire a professional brokerage house or seek out costly consultants. The author describes specific companies that have proven to be successful picks and candidly discusses his failures, as well. This very brief work comes in at less than 50 pages, so it’s more like a pamphlet than a full-length monograph. The entire text is written in a very breezy, conversational style and presented with the aesthetics of a comic book, replete with cartoonish illustrations, which makes it an enjoyable read. Its message is clear and well-organized, and it provides immediately actionable instruction. Some of it is more philosophical than financial; Hauptfuhrer points out, for instance, that a successful long-term investor has to learn to trust his instincts—or “fact-based faith”—and resist the fear of short-term losses and the allure of quick windfalls. Overall, this is a sound, unpretentious primer for beginners.

A well-crafted, easy-to-follow seminar on long-term investment.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 44

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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