the TOP 100 Professional Finance Books - 11/05/2008
all of the TOP 100 Books are avalible to buy on amazon.co.uk - just click on the item to buy
Professional Finance
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Review:
The Naked Trader: How Anyone Can Make Money Trading Shares
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Review:
Bloody Awesome!!!
I have just finished this book and by 'just', i mean 2 minutes ago. Secondly, i have never written a review as normally can't be arsed for that kind of thing, however, i am moved by this book!<br />As an absolte newbie to this world, i found it extremely informative, written in plain English rather than 'over using' ridiculous amounts of complicated financial terminology.<br />Following this read, two things are going to happen;<br />1) I am going to start trading in shares<br />2) I am going to one of Robbies (The Naked Trader Himself) seminars for a full days 'education'.<br />Most importantly though, the book is excellently executed in that it has the same magnetic hold as when reading a novel and this just makes the inormation sink in that much easier!<br />WELL DONE MR NT!<br /><br />In summary..........<br />If you want to get in to shares - this is an absolute must!!!!!!!!!!!3
Review:
Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons in Life (Quick Reads)
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Uninspiring
As someone keen to learn from entrepreneurs I didn't find this book useful; it is too brief and lacking in substance to be of any real use in that respect. I like Richard Branson and feel that he surely has much more insight to offer than is contained within this short book, so I will probably buy his full autobiography.<br /><br />4
5
Review:
Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders
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Intriguing look inside the head of a million-dollar trader
This trading-room memoir harks back to a group of novices whom experts recruited in the 1980s and - to fulfill a bet - trained to be traders. The training worked, according to the most successful student, author Curtis M. Faith. His memoir promises what any capitalist would love to possess: the secret to making money in volatile markets. Alas, Faith tells us, there is no secret. Successful traders analyze markets to find an edge, then remain disciplined enough to pursue that edge, even when their hearts and their guts try to overrule their brains. In spite of constant references to Donchian channels and Sharpe ratios, Faith assures readers that trading isn't a matter of using secret formulas but of applying time-tested wisdom. His tome is intriguing because it lets you inside the thoughts of someone who made $30 million as a trader (so no wonder he tends toward the self-congratulatory, though his anecdotes are entertaining). We recommend this to traders seeking an advantage and to those who want to watch the experts try to beat the odds.6
Review:
Liar's Poker (Hodder Great Reads)
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The Best
Let me put this in the most simple of terms, this is my favourite book of all time. I have just re-read it after leaving it on the shelf for a few years, and I still love it, love it, love it. Read it, your life is not complete without it.7
Review:
The Top 10 Investments for the Next 10 Years: Investing your way to financial prosperity
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Review:
great ideas
Think some of the ideas and investment tips are very good and well thought out. Easy to understand and some good advice for you to prosper in the future. Needed a little more information on some chapters about how to go about investing. Also i think you need to have quite abit of cash to if you want to invest in everything this book reccomends8
Review:
The Financial Spread Betting Handbook: A Guide to Making Money Trading Spread Bets
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Review:
A MUST HAVE FOR ALL SPREADBETTERS
I bought this book a few months ago when I started spreadbetting. It has been an invaluable resource and I am always referring to it. Every page has valuable information and I keep on re-reading certain parts. It teaches the fact that spread betting is not a game and you have to have a systematic approach otherwise you'll lose money. You may still gain from studying technical analysis in more detail though this is also covered somewhat in the book.Highly recommended.9
Review:
The Intelligent Investor
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Lives up to the hype
Most investors seem to have heard of this book - many refer to it as the bible of value investing. I think that the esteem that it is held in is probably counter productive (Barton Biggs, hedge fund manager, talks about being asked to read and annotate it twice as a young man), but what impressed me is that it is a very simple readable book that explains how to invest long term, to maximise wealth.<br /><br />I don't think that Zweig's commentary adds much - I would pay more for a version with it excised - it provides interesting detail on what Graham may have considered important which is great, but it also provides a lot of anecdotal evidence which could be misleading. It also triples the length and provides a lot of distraction.10
Review:
Rules of Management: The Definitive Guide to Managerial Success
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Another Rules of Management
The rules of management has been highly acclaimed as brilliant and a bible for all people in management. The book itself lays down guidlines from the writers and others experience about how you should act in management positions. The rules are for the most part very obvious and things that most people who are natural leaders will know anyway, still it is good as an occasional reminder to make you think through these things properly.<br /><br />Many managers will neglect certain aspects of their job or perform them callously which can create difficulty and tension among staff. Particularly important in my opinion are the rules regarding respecting and trusting your staff, the amount of managers I have known who have not trusted staff to do the jobs they are given and thus run themselves into the ground with worry at their staff's perceived incompetence is enormous. <br /><br />This book is certainly nothing groundbreaking and nothing that hasnt been done 100 times before however for a general reference and a reminder to yourself how to keep in control you cant go far wrong.11
Review:
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management
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Utterly imprecise
Horrible book. Very interesting topic but very poor story telling. The author clearly knows next to nothing about statistics and finance and did very poor research; non experts in the field will struggle to understand the key concepts behind the trading strategies. True, some of those trades were extremely complex, but at least the basic concepts could and should have been explained more clearly. If I didn't work in finance myself I would have understood very little. <br />One passage is particularly worth commenting on, when the author mentions theoretical models whereby asset"prices follow the normal distribution, or, in mathematical terms, the log-normal distribution". ??? Unless we speak a different language, this phrase means that the log-normal is the mathematical definition of what is commonly known as the normal distribution. The truth is of course very different: if data is lognormal, then its log is normally distributed, i.e. they are 2 different distributions, related but different!!! A mistake so huge I don't even have words to comment.12
Review:
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Investors and Managers, Revised Edition
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Review:
The only authentic Buffett
Too many books contain the word Buffett in their title but only this book comes from the annual letters to shareholders. Truly authentic Buffett in his own words is much better just because he dosen't need any interpretation. <br />Domenico De Salvo<br />13
Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
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Review:
The Financial Times Guide to Investing
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Review:
Utterly brilliant
What a fantastic book. I came to this book whilst studying business finance as part of an MBA. My class work didn't really touch on the markets, and while I have a good grasp of economics, the mysteries of the markets have always escaped me. This book is fantastic. Exceptionally well written and clear it explains key concepts really well. Great detail from the basics (company structure, different types of investment), through calculating ratios and analysing company accounts & industries, to (what seem to me) the more esoteric areas of derivatives and warrants. If you are looking to start investing, or just understand how the markets work, this is the ideal introduction.15
Review:
Bookkeeping for Dummies (For Dummies)
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Review:
What bookkeeping is
The book gives an overview of bookkeeping dealing with all aspects of what is necessary to enable someone to understand how and why financial records are compiled and what those records can tell you about the finacial health of the business. The guidance offered in this book will give anyone a better understanding of how a business is performing and an idea of what to do about it. The one criticism I have would be the lack of worked examples in the book. However the book is worth the purchase price.<br />A companion book would be a work book dealing with actual examples with suggested answers to further reinforce the topics covered in the book.16
Review:
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
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Review:
Read the first half of the book - excellent. 2nd half- dull
I have been reading their reviews over the years and its good to see a summary book of their principles of value innovation. Their contextual examples really emphasise their thoughts well and for any practising marketeer, the strategic canvass section is an excellent tool in developing genuine new market space. By identifying key qualities in a market, or consumer need, and then reducing, eliminating, increasing or creating qualities, new market space is found. The end of the book is filler and offers no more insight than many other books on similar subjects - but then at least you only have to read half the book to gets it true value.17
Review:
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
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Review:
The Bottom Billion
I find Paul Collier's book(The Bottom Billion) interesting to read. He easily highlights Many of the economic difficulties facing the poorest countries in the world. He then suggests multi-faced approach that can be applied to tackle some of the issues he highlighted, not only by the poor countries themselves but also by the so called "donor" countries. <br /><br />Much of Paul's argument is based on data collected by international organization such as IMF and The World Bank and so on. When reading through the pages you would meet some high ranking individuals in these countries, i.e. the Finance minister, but rarely the ordinary person in the street and the challenges he/she faces. In my opinion this is the main weakness of this book. It's a top down approach. He does not talk so much about some of the side effects that export driven policies had on these countries such as planting crops for export in the best available land instead of the staple food of the country which people need to survive. Overall very good book, though I encourage Paul to get out of the big hotels and ministerial headquarters and meet ordinary people next time he visits one of these countries.<br />18
Review:
Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
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Review:
Please read this... but now where do you invest your pension?
Entertaining, insightful, skeptical rather than cynical. This book opens the can of worms that is Derivatives and those that peddle them. As someone who has spent the last 12 years selling trading systems in to this group, it was fascinating to gain an insight as to why TARNs, PRDC and the Range Accruals were so important. I was very interested to understand the real thinking underlying the various products, many of which have I have had to workshop/demonstrate as part of the sales process when banks go to market for a new trading system. <br /><br />This is a good book written by someone who has seen it all, he clearly outlines why the trading floors of the major financial centers are little more than casinos that close at 5pm. The lead-in to the recent Credit crisis is well handled in chapter 9.<br /><br />My only worry now is where now do I invest my pension fund?<br />19
Review:
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
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Review:
Elegant and clear analysis of the wealth and poverty of nations
The topic of this thrilling book, 20 years in the making, is nothing less than the history of civilization, from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to today. Rather than relating history as a story of kings, Caesars, popes, prelates and presidents, Gregory Clark tells the story through economic data, much of which is the result of his own analysis of documentary evidence. Almost every other page contains a beautiful graph, table or chart illuminating some dimly lit bit of history. And Clark's detours are almost as wonderful as his main argument. His writing is elegant and clear, his sense of humor present but not annoying. While this book has outraged some commentators, it's hard to see why, given the caution with which Clark presents his conclusions. Most likely, the flash point is his stress on culture as enabling and retarding economic growth - views that sometimes get wrongly equated with racism. We recommend this book to anyone who wants to quantitatively enhance his or her conception of human history.20
Review:
Rich Dad, Poor Dad 2: Cash Flow Quadrant - Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom (Rich Dad)
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Not a rehash of Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Frankly, I had doubt as to whether this book is sort of a rehash of the"Rich Dad, Poor Dad". Fortunately, after I read it, I found that it was neither a waste of money buying it nor a waste of time reading it. Mr. Kiyosaki has elucidated his message, which is implied in his"Rich Dad, Poor Dad", clearly and systematically in this book. My own copy has underlings throughout now, and I suppose that it will become dog-eared very soon. Thanks to this book, I have got a much clearer long-term perspective and strategy with my personal finance.<br /><br />My only complaint is that the author should have integrated"Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and"Rich Dad, Poor Dad 2" into a single book. Having said that, this might have been one of the sales strategies of the author, which has made him so rich.
If you want to"live rich" and"collect assets", then buy this one!
This is one of those exciting books where the person I was before I read it and the person I am now are two completely different people. Rich Dad, Poor Dad completely changed my thinking; the way I thought about money and how it worked or didn't work for me. The book outlines a (thinking) trap that so many people fall into and Robert Kiyosaki steers you into another direction based on common (financial) sense, rather than one which follows the crowd. And there's the sting: I think the ideas in this book will set you free but it's the start of a great commitment to be different and step out in his faith. I'm not building up my own empire like Robert Kiyosaki but I am governing my finances and making smarter decisions about my future and that's no small thing. If seeing your money, as"employees" who work 24/7 and never leave, is exciting then this is the book for you.