Description:
Most people who've caught the investment bug and have any common sense should know success is never as easy as it seems, despite the markets' furious rise in the past few years. And only the most foolish and naive of do-it-yourself investors would pass up the chance to learn from those who've been successful in the past. Leo Gough's Trading the World Markets features eight great global investors, several of whom have already been featured in other books: one, the eccentric motorbiker Jim Rogers (a former partner of George Soros), was featured in the second of John Train's books. Two others, the emerging-markets expert Mark Mobius and the Hong Kong-based professional doomster Marc Faber, seem to have been in every book and magazine published on investment.The whole point about books like this is not to discover specific investment ideas but rather to learn more about the mental and intellectual disciplines needed to sustain a record of winning investments. There are some stimulating and interesting bits here. Two of the most pertinent pieces of advice are currently being widely ignored. The first is: "Most of the time the best thing that you can do is do nothing ... look out of the window, go to the movies, drink beer". In other words, only invest when you are reasonably confident you know why and what you are buying. The second is directed at the Internet: "Just because an industry changes the world, it doesn't mean you are going to make any money if you buy that industry at the wrong time in the frenzy". All in all, the book's general advice points in the opposite direction of which most investors are currently headed. In the years to come, it may look quite prescient; as Sir John Templeton first pointed out, the only sure-fire way to make money in the stock market is to do something that most other people already are not. --Jonathan Davis
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