Investment Book Reviews

Reviews for Investment Books

On this page, I’ll sharing my investing book reviews, as well opinions on books about retirement, marketing, and passive income.

Retirement Investing for Income only by Bruce Miller; CFP

This is by far one of the better investing books I’ve read, in particular if your goal is to produce cash flow and income. He goes over things like Dividend Stocks, Closed End Funds, REITS, MLP’s, as well as investments to avoid. The whole reason I know how to evaluate a REIT’s ability to pay it’s dividend is because of this book. The book avoids the wordiness and rambling found in so many other investment books. He gets right to the point and you learn about all the possible income investments you can put in your brokerage or retirement account. Read my COMPLETE REVIEW

The Acquirer’s Multiple:How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value beat the market by Tobias Carlisle

Unfortunately this was not one of my favorite investment books. He mentions investors whose family gave them say 600K and talks about Warren Buffet a lot. He paints a lot of situations that don’t exist for most of us, buying out companies and more. I think it’s a simple equation that could be said in fewer words with less stories, none that really support the premise. In short-Find something undervalued using specific metrics and buy it. Also on page 145, interesting of note is 2011-2015 and 2017 the market actually beats the formula he recommends. That’s SIX of the last seven years it didn’t beat the market. Once again, I find the method presented in this book isn’t supported by the data. On the other hand, I did find the sections on Enterprise Value and earnings quite helpful. My recommendation is PASS on the book.

BONDS

Bonds: The Unbeaten Path to Secure Investment Growth by Hildy and Stan Richelson

Read my full review here: https://ripeforinvesting.com/investment-book-review-bonds-the-unbeaten-path

If there is ANYTHING you want to know about investing in bonds, this is the place to learn. It’s a pretty large book, so you’ll be referencing for years. I go back to this book any time I need to know something about bonds. There are some issues with it, I think the arguments they make for bonds only work in specific environments (low inflation for example). However, it gets a big RECOMMEND from me.

More books I’ve read and recommend:

The Missing Risk Premium: Why Low Volatility Investing Works by Eric Falkenstein.

Falkenstein talks about why taking on additional risks at some point is not beneficial. He presents lots of data and information about how stocks with low volatility have outperformed those of high volatility and high risks over the last few decades. Eric is quite humorous, so it’s a funny read; the jargon does gets heavy a few times. Another book I highly RECOMMEND. This should be on every investor’s bookshelf.

The art of the Start 2.0 by Guy Kawaski

Living off your Money: The Modern Mechanics of Investing During Retirement with Stocks and Bonds by Michael McClung

This is a great book for any investor to own, especially those nearing retirement. It is a bit overwhelming, it has more spreadsheets and data than imaginable. He is on a mission to prove his point, which is withdrawing the same amount every year in retirement is an outdated approach to retirement investing. He shows how a large number of tactics perform over the course of decades and some ways to best invest for retirement. One main takeaway-don’t go too conservative with your investments or you stand the chance of running out of money!

The Misbehavior of Markets by Mandelbrot

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan

I’m including this book because Statistics is quite useful for stock research. Perhaps you’d like to see how much a stocks price moves around, what the standard deviation is? What does mean/average/mode tell you? You’ll find it all in this book. Once again, Charles is very humorous and it’s not a difficult read for a statistics book.