WALL STREET LESSONS

Veteran wealth management expert Demmert outlines investment strategies in this nonfiction guide.

The author opens his book with a declaration some might find surprising coming from a long-time financial advisor: Greed is a destructive emotion that can “ruin your potential to create wealth on Wall Street.” According to Demmert, primitive emotions like fear and greed drive many of the psychological mistakes people make when investing—hence his contention that people can become their own worst enemies if they don’t take common-sense precautions against the “sudden unexpected nosedives” to which, history has shown, investments can be vulnerable. Through stories drawn from his long experience with clients, the author lays out the basic facts of many aspects of finance, from risk management to portfolio diversification, always assessing the risks and possible rewards of any financial actions the reader might be thinking of taking. Demmert also includes many charts and graphs of increasing levels of complexity and detail, most of them tailored to that same imperative of assessing and mitigating risk. “Today’s world is too unpredictable and volatile to risk any portion of one’s wealth,” he writes. “I see no reason why any investor would want to stand idly by and watch any portion of their investment lose value, based on the assumption that ‘things will rebalance’ soon enough.” That tone of clear, no-nonsense honesty carries through the book, and this straight-shooting more than compensates for Demmert’s weakness for cliches (“Sometimes it is not a light at the end of the tunnel—but an oncoming train!”; “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”). The sheer amount of carefully explained information and the author’s insights in these pages will doubtless be invaluable to investors at all levels.

A detailed, comprehensive guidebook to sensible investing.