Customer Reviews

Investment Blunders of the Rich and Famous...and What You Can Learn From Them

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This book is one of the most peculiar I have ever read in terms of handling its subject. The book's title subject isn't directly addressed until chapters 12-14, and then doesn't provide anything you couldn't read about in a more detailed and interesting way somewhere else. It's as though the publisher's marketing department tried to create a title to make the book into something that it really isn't.

Then, all of the proactive advice is saved for chapter 15. That material is about as developed as a magazine article. You need to have specific financial goals, determine a reasonable investment rate of return to seek (in light of your age and goals), make appropriate asset allocations, and then find cheap ways to implement your approach (such as with index funds and exchange traded funds).

The material in the earlier chapters is entertaining, and generally well done (and properly referenced) but it just doesn't fit well into a book to teach you how to invest. It's like a series of interesting factoids, without connecting the dots very well. Any of John Bogle's books would do you more good in terms of understanding these same issues when it comes to your investing. A new book, A Mathematician Plays the Market, is also a superior story to this one.

It's very hard to scale up article-sized bits of knowledge into a book. I recommend that Professor Nofsinger find a co-author for a future edition to help him better string together his story. His knowledge level seems good, and he would seem to be capable of producing a much better book in the future. I hope he does.

I wish I had read raspell's review before I bought the book. Now I've given up in frustration after 6 chapters, or about one-third through. As raspell pointed out, not one investment blunder by anyone rich OR famous was mentioned in the first third of the book.

Not only that, it is peppered with generalisms which the author makes little attempt to explain, and which in any case sound fishy to me. Like this one: you are only rewarded for taking market risk, not stock-specific risk, hence there is no point taking stock-specific risk. If I remember my rational economics, all risk must be rewarded, otherwise no one will take them.

Finally, it contains dangerous analytical flaws, which can lead to bad investment decisions. For example, it asserts wrongly that it is illogical if a stock's market capitalisation is less than the value of an asset it owns. This totally ignores the question of how the asset is funded. If a company owns nothing but an asset worth $1b, funded by loans worth $1b, is the company worth $1b?

I would seriously not recommend this book to anyone.

PS. I have since gone on to read Chapters 12-14, which deal with the blunders of five big-time traders. Three chapters out of 15 - that's a poor execution of the title, I'm afraid. I can get more from an hour or two on the net.

Investment Blunders of the Rich and Famous? A great title for a book that enticed this sucker to buy it. But really the book is nothing but a general examination of investment theory. Let me save you the purchase of the book. You can't beat the market and studies prove if you try you will waste too much money in brokerage comissions. How depressing!!!

And who are these rich and famous? They are nowhere to be found. He does have a chapter of famous losers like Nick Leeson who broke an English bank and Robert Citron who bankrupted Orange County California. But that is as close as you get to this misleading title.

About the only positive I found in this book was an in-depth study of investor's behavioral patterns. Overall, I'd recommend you pass on this book.

The author should be sued for deception. The biggest blunder I've ever made was buying this book.