by Nigel Roberts with David Berger
As Chapter 1 of this handy pocket-sized guide points out, the financial world preys on ignorance and fear. And where can there be more opportunity for confusion than a heady cocktail of stock and bond markets fused with the frightening and exploding world of internet dealing by computer? Phew! It's enough to make Aunt Agatha's socks catch fire!
But it's all the Aunt Agathas of this world who have the convenient combination of the time and the money to make waves on the personal investment front. Trouble is it's all so daunting.
This guide is a more sober read than the Motley Fool UK Investment Workbook reviewed separately, and - assuming that to be its mission - is very comprehensive. However, despite its flowing and colourful prose in well-broken up sections, it inevitably has less of the light touch which so endears the Workbook. Do not regard that as a criticism - it is just an observation that, of necessity, truly technical subjects require a certain amount of technical attention.
This book is aimed at the intermediate and serious web browser who wants to talk turkey, research companies and deal for real. Many pages are devoted to "screen grabs" so you can see what you will get when you are connected. But its brief goes much wider than the mere mechanics of internet share and fund dealing. Masses of background information on types of deal, how to select a broker and the nuts and bolts of company analysis fill just over 200 pages of pithy advice and information. Co-author Nigel Roberts spent a considerable amount of time posting messages on the Fool UK message boards before coming to the attention of "Founding Fool" David Berger as something of an expert. As Berger, says, "in the end we had to hire him."
A fundamental point is that if something is a good (or bad) idea online it is probably the same offline. The internet may appear a Holy Grail in some regards, but ultimately it is just another way of doing the same thing more quickly. So, Chapter 4 on "Investing Guidelines" particularly took my attention as an ex-financial adviser and now journalist because it correctly labours a variety of points that help make private investors successful. "Don't do anything at all" [track an imaginary portfolio for a while before spending real money], "buy and hold" [avoid short termism] and "don't get wrapped up in tipping and timing" are truisms whether you use a computer or pigeon post to undertake your trades. In fact, without knocking its titled purpose, I would stick my neck out and say that the Fool's Guide to Online Investing has more to recommend it from its exposition of investment principles than its specific address of how to effect them specifically online.
Branding it an "online" publication may shift copies out of shops and into homes, but so long as readers learn something about those basic investment principles, its value will be more in the fundamentals it covers than today's methods of trading which, as so often before, can change oh so quickly. In tipster terms: a "buy".
Michael Drewett, May 19 2000
208 pages, £5.99
ISBN O 7522 1810 7
Published by Boxtree
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