Review:
The Daily Telegraph Guide to Investing offers brief descriptions of investments, listed by risk category from pretty safe to high risk/reward assets. Discussed are standard investments like stocks, bonds and gold, but also more “wacky” physical assets like whisky, Lego sets and antique violins.
What’s bad about The Daily Telegraph Guide to Investing? While Burn-Callander presents an illustrious variety of investment options, this is a rather slim book. Each investment option gets but a brief portrait, interested investors have to put in a lot of research to actually apply anything. Also, the book puts to much focus on rather obscure physical assets like red wine, Barbie dolls and comic books, that need tons of experience for even slightly accurate evaluations. Also, these kind of assets may be highly sought after by collectors now, but may be worthless in a few years. And even if they do accrue some value, all your profits are theoretical until you actually find someone to sell the thing to. Until then you get nothing and bear the full costs of ownership, like storage and insurance. The risk evaluation for each asset class is all over the place. Why is rental and let real estate two risk categories apart, while stocks, bonds and cash savings get the same classification?
What’s good about The Daily Telegraph Guide to Investing? There are big books written about individual assets and investment strategies that worked in the past, so a small book providing the big picture is actually very useful. Burn-Callander gives a teaser for a wide variety of investments and provides just enough information to nudge her readers towards educating themselves about the bits that sparked their interest. The focus on unusual “passion investments” like red wine, Barbie dolls and comic books illustrates the investment opportunities that surround us, if we learn to recognize them. The author sorts different asset classes by somewhat eccentrically cut risk categories, putting most “vanilla” investments like stocks, bonds and cash savings into the same category of “relatively safe”, highlighting the world of possibilities (risk and reward) beyond.
If you have some money to invest, and want an overview of all your options, I highly recommend The Daily Telegraph Guide to Investing as a starting point. You will find a brief summary and usually some links to resource websites or investment platforms to do your own research on investments you are interested in. Just don’t expect more, and everything will be fine.
And if you don’t have any money to invest, maybe start with some inspirational books (like this one or this one) first?
Key points:
- Be open for investment opportunities, even if they seem eccentric.
- Keep the risk in mind and plan your portfolio adequately.
- Use the teasers in this book as a starting point for your own research.
Author affiliations:
Rebecca Burn-Callander is a business journalist and enterprise editor at the Daily Telegraph.
Review copy:
copy provided by publisher
Kogan Page; 1 edition (December 28, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0749477938
ISBN-13: 978-0749477936
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