Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Recommend Books on Investing in Australia for My Reader

A reader commented on my last post:

"Hi
I have a question for you. After 2 years of travelling I am coming back to Australia and I want to start investing my money wisely. I am completely new to the topic of investments and I was wondering if you could recommend a book I could read that would be a good starting point. There is lots of books on the market but I'm not sure how to choose. I'll appreciate you help. M"

Do any of you have recommendations on which books are worth reading. The only one I've bought recently was on superannuation. I'll have to check the author/title later on.

Please post your suggestions in the comments.

4 comments:

Bytta@151DaysOff said...

Hello, first time here.
I'm currently reading Buffettology which is surprisingly easy to read... well, at least for the first few chapters.

Most personal finance books (like the one written by Scott Pape) would normally recommend to diversify and invest on index fund. But books like Buffettology or the ones by Benjamin Graham focus on the business side of investing.

Anonymous said...

Hi. I'm the one who aksed the question :)Thanks for trying to help me with find a good book :)
I am after a book which explains the basic. It doesn't have to be about investing specifically in Australia. What I need is something that will help me understand the options I have while investing, how things work etc. I want to learn it so I can make wise choices.

mOOm said...

The superannuation book I recommended was: "The Superannuation Handbook" by Barbara Smith and Ed Koken. It has some of basics about investing too.

Personally, I got a book out of our university library on investment theory (I'm an economist though) and otherwise mainly got up to speed by reading stuff on the web (and this was 1997 or so..) Then I bought a bunch of books including the Buffetology recommended above. However, at this point I've basically given up on rying to pick stocks or trade myself and just try to find good fund managers and diversify with a very little market timing. Others say you should just go down the index fund route if so then reading John Bogle is porbably a good start though I can't stand him for some reason.

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

I'd recommend a quick read through the following:

Richest Man in Babylon

Nillionaire Next Door

Random Walk Down Wall Street

Intelligent Asset Allocation - Bernstein

I'd then do a self-evaluation of risk-tolerance, spend some time thinking about short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, and then pick a target risk-return and investment time frame.

You would then be in a position to think about whether you want to passively invest (eg. index funds), actively invest (eg. direct stock/property investment), or trade.

It's hard to recommend anything more specific (eg. investment analysis books, trading strategy books etc) without knowing lots about you. Also, we can only recommend in areas we are familiar with (eg. I wouldn't know what to recommend in the area of technical analysis, and Moom probably wouldn't do so in the area of residential property investing).