Free eBook on Investing by William Bernstein - $0

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Dacs on 03/03/2016 - 09:32 amazon.com.au (1209 clicks)

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"If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly" by William J Bernstein.
This is the #1 best seller on Mutual Funds in the Kindle store.

William Bernstein is arguably the best author of books on practical and sensible investing. This particular book is a must-read if you are starting out investing for the long term but feeling baffled by BS from investment companies and financial planners with their own profits as priority. It is also an excellent read for anybody else interested in their retirement investments even if you are not just starting out. It is written for the US market but you can apply the logic to the Australian situation (eg considering Superannuation as similar to 401k plans).
Enjoy!

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  [Deactivated] on 03/03/2016 - 11:19

  great book. very short and easy to read.

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  montorola on 03/03/2016 - 13:27

  +1

  Thanks Dacs!

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  Ion on 03/03/2016 - 17:40

  Can someone please put it on Dropbox or cloud storage? Don't have an Amazon account,

  Many Thanks

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  Serapis on 03/03/2016 - 18:25

  But 401(k) does not apply here but still it's free

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  Diji1 on 03/03/2016 - 20:20

  +1

  I've read a few other books by this guy that were certainly well researched if nothing else - they make a lot of sense to me.

  My favorite was by far one called "The Four Pillars of Investing" - in a nutshell he shows how anything other than indexed investing (your portfolio of stocks is automatically managed to match the index of a sector or market such as the S&P 500) is essentially irrational because nobody, barring possibly 2 people in history one of which is ol' Warran Buffet, has managed to "beat the market" over the long term.

  An index fund is one where your portfolio of stocks is matched to the market cap of a given index (eg. S&P 500 or the ASX 200) so you own the largest amount of the biggest company in the index by market cap, you own the second largest amount of the second largest company in the index and so on until you own the least amount of shares in the smallest company in the index.

  This might seem complicated but what that does is mean you achieve the same returns as the index and since indexes usually cover large swathes of entire markets you usually achieve a return around that of the entire market.

  So essentially the advice is simple: if you are going to invest in stocks the only rational vehicle is an index fund, of which there are many, however almost all of them are terrible.

  Because you never, ever choose an index fund that isn't owned by the funds investors. When you place your money with these types of index funds (he is a big fan of Vanguard 500 fund from memory) you buy a share of the fund so there is no incentive for the daylight robbery known as fees to occur. Which in he long term makes all the difference due to the 8th Wonder of the World.

  If the market wins you win, if the market loses you lose but since markets have a proven history of going up over the long term this is as close as you can get to not gambling as it gets. A well managed index fund, with no reason to rob it's investors with fees, returns on average a very small percentage above the market rate due to an effect of backing more winners than losers unlike "normal" investors or gamblers or people using index funds owned by banksters but it isn't spectacular.

  If you want to read that in 700 pages or whatever he has you covered with The Four Pillars though, I enjoyed it :)

  He doesn't push anything other than constantly using Vanguard 500 fund as an example - I can only assume he has a large holding in this fund though ;)

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  [Deactivated] on 03/03/2016 - 21:57

  +1

  ahh fantastic read, thanks!

  i'm going to share with my parents to try and convince them I wasn't crazy for taking out a margin loan for shares last month :D