Customer Reviews

Supermoney

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I've always loved reading books written about investing. Supermoney provides the reader with a basic fundamental view of his accounts of investing in the 60's & 70's. I found the first couple of chapters to be interesting...it got a little slow towards the end though. If I got anything from reading this book, it had to be about Supercurrency. The author describes it as super wealth creation via the stock market and more specifically the IPO market. Create a company, go public and become instant millionaires and billionaires. The author also describes it as "minting wealth" from nothing.

In my opinion, the other reviewers miss the mark on this book. I bought this book when it first came out (yes, I was at the Lincoln inauguration...).

Anyway, this book has stuck with me all of those years for one over-riding principle...SuperMoney. What is SuperMoney? SuperMoney is the money you get when you leverage your own investment in your business into a publicly-traded company, and multiply it many times over.

Let's say you have a clever idea, and start a business. Let's say it's a furniture company, called, oh, I don't know, maybe Levitz Furniture (Levitz furniture, now defunct, pioneered the furniture warehouse concept. Some people will remember the musical slogan, 'You'll love it at Levitz!). This is an example from the book.

Anyway, you start this company. It's successful. You open a couple more branches. They are successful. You decide to incorporate and sell stock. The financial community suddenly falls in love with the idea of a furniture superstore, because they've never heard of such an idea before.

Now, your company, which started out pretty small, now has lots of people bidding up your company's stock. It turns out to be a hot stock. Since you started the company, you own most of the stock. Congratulations, my friend, you now have wheelbarrows full of money. SuperMoney! Remember the fancy furniture store that would never buy your mass-market furniture, with the owner who held his nose up in the air? Want revenge? Buy it! Use your new-found wealth, SuperMoney. Just sell off some of your stock, or have the company issue more stock and use that to trade for the assets of the hoity-toity company. Fire the manager who used to look down at you!

Or let's say you own a big, but boring utility company. Yes, you are rich, but nobody invites you to flashy parties where starlets (yes, that is a word) flit around and the champagne flows like water. Peel off some of that SuperMoney, and buy, I don't know...maybe a movie studio! Or maybe a fancy winery selling wines whose names you can't pronounce! Or maybe a super-snooty hotel where the restaurant sells $100 dinner courses!

It's a whole new world out there, isn't it? SuperMoney!

Highly recommended. This is an extremely entertaining book that explains the often arcane concepts such as leverage and publicly-traded companies in fun and illuminating (and real) examples.

Willie Sutton used to say he robbed banks because that's where the money was. Why risk jail time when you can be wealthier than you ever dreamed possible...just read this book, and come up with something new and catchy...

Super Money is the follow up book to the earlier and wildly successful Money Game by 'Adam Smith' the pseudonym chosen by George Goodman. Super Money provides a series of linked vignettes of the adventures in the pursuit of money. The big news from this 1970s book is its identification of Warren Buffett (yes, that one) as the outstanding money manager of his time. Forty years ago 'Adam Smith' got it right with Mr. Buffett. The remainder of the book is just as accurate and informative even though it's the Old Old Thing. I would also more highly recommend the early book, The Money Game.

The entire book was quite interesting but of particular attraction to me was the chapter about Warren Buffett. Written in the 70s, when Buffett was 'merely' a hugely successful multi-millionaire rather than the billionaire we know and love today, it provides a new perspective and additional information about his rise to success during that hiatus from his investing career - after he dissolved his original investing partnerships but before the next wave of success with Berkshire Hathaway which saw him become one of the world's richest men.

A novelty - it's worth tracking down.

I got this book because having heard it is a classic but I never made it past the first chapter because the writing is this old style and it's really boring to the core.