After I Read 40 Books on Investing – Here’s What Will Make You Rich #Finance

so over the past year I’ve read 40 of the best-selling books on Personal Finance money and investing because I wanted to really get to the bottom of what it takes to be the best

investor how to make money in the Stock Market and make sure I’m making the most of what I actually earn I’ve read everything from very basic books on Personal none;">Finance beginner’s guide to Stock Market investing beginner’s guides to actually investing in different kinds of companies importantly then investing into different kinds of index funds and then also books on the history of index funds as well I thought that

if I read all of these books and more which are always arriving in the post and I’d be able to make more money in stocks but come as good as Peter Lynch Warren Buffett or Howard marks and then just retire in a few years off into the sunset but to be honest I think you’re going to be

really surprised with what I’m going to say as what I’ve learned is far from what I expected when I first got into this and actually I’ve completely changed my mind about a few things and obviously I’m not rich yet but let me explain as we go on so let’s just start

with the most famous ones because I pretty much run down the Amazon bestsellers list and then a few recommendations I’ve seen online I I didn’t want to pretend I knew everything and I wanted to really start from scratch to see what kind of Journey you go on as someone who’s new to

investing and trying to manage money all right so the basics and super popular ones do they live up to the hype Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki sold around 40 million copies apparently and it’s really a simple story about two different dads as he puts it showing how wealthy people act

and best ways to actually get rich and then stay Rich too and I can easily see why the book’s done really well because even though it might seem basic again none of us get told the key principles When We’re Young unless we’re really really lucky so basic lessons like explaining

the difference between Assets and Liabilities why some people waste all of their time looking Rich by buying fancy cars and getting huge mortgages and big houses that actually end up pretty poor and those who are actually wealthy spend their money on

Assets and things that actually produce Income Cash Flows and increase in value over time all of the concepts sound really basic but they’re so important to understand and I can definitely relate to a lot of the stories when I was younger

when I would get nice commission paychecks from my job in sales my first thought was to Great more money to spend and then I’d spend that money mostly on stuff which just ends up losing money over time and that stuff would all fall into liability category whereas I should have been buying

more Assets the stuff that goes up in value over time and it would have been a lot richer than I was now I do think that this book deserves its place up there on the best book list nice and short to the point and some great lessons and anyone can read this one I’d highly

recommend it here’s another one that sold so many copies Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill another one that sold tens of millions first published back in 1937 so this one’s been around for decades this one starts off interestingly enough the officer says he’s interviewed

thousands of people about their success met with the richest man at the time Andrew Carnegie and been an advisor to president and he’s going to tell you all the secrets of how to be successful too the idea is great and you think right buckle up let’s go show me the secrets but then for

me it doesn’t deliver at all the messages are all too wishy-washy you just think positive thoughts and get rich or you stay persistent and keep going and you’ll just get everything you want and while I know how important a lot of those messages are after working in sales for many years

being persistent not giving up and pushing forward there’s a time and a place to try new things and not just beating the same old drum I do think the message is valuable though a positive mindset is really important and actually when I go back to some of the business books I’ve read

like Phil Knight shoe dog which is the story of founding Nike or the book about Netflix you’d always see the same themes that people push through some really hard times to get where they did today and the success that you actually see now wasn’t made overnight anyway some good Concepts

here but not a recommended one from me I think there’s also loads of controversy around whether or not he actually met Andrew Carnegie and did anything he actually says in the book there’s no evidence around that and I think there’s a lesson here that some of the best-selling

books stay in the top sellers because they just stay as top sellers so I hope you understand what I mean but being a top seller just kind of validates it when in reality it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good book it’s just sold Lots in the past still though mindset is important

so that’s a lesson in itself you’re always going to be negative then you definitely won’t get too far in life on some more basic concepts let me share with you some other books are all going to be worth the read and they’re all good with getting those foundations right

because I definitely don’t think you need to be jumping right into the complex stuff and it all gets very very confusing in the end the psychology of money is a great book and it’s no surprise it’s staying in the number one spot at the moment up on the Amazon bestseller list so I

know we just spoke about how important it is to have the right mindset when it comes to investing and it’s easier said than done and this book really goes into all the ways that you need to think about money getting rich and then most importantly keeping that money as well there’s a ton

of great lessons in here it’s easy to read too which always helps and there’s no jargon about the Finance industry one of my favorite quotes from the book is that

controlling your time is the highest dividend money pace and also you need a lot of time to make things happen now Morgan talks about Warren Buffett in this book like we all do but reminds us that his success and super high Net Worth came through compounding returns and time lots

of it our patience and controlling your own actions and emotions are some of the most underappreciated skills in my opinion and even after all of the books I’ve now read on the Stock Market how to pick winning stocks how some of the best investors have got wealthy I’m

now more convinced now more than ever that your own behaviors are so much more important than say spending more hours looking at company Financial Statements some great stories in the book too I’ve covered this one before in another CashNews.co of a regular guy in the US who

builds up a massive investment pot and it’s only actually found out when he passes away and he didn’t do a fancy job he worked as a gas station attendant and then as a janitor invested small amounts of money and reinvested Dividends into safe companies over many many

decades and none of his family knew what he did until afterward passed away when he had eight million dollars which is a huge amount which he ended up donating to a local hospital and a library as well as the rest of his family now that is a great story and a reminder about what’s possible I

think this ties back to a lot of the basics from Rich Dad Poor Dad that a big part of this money and investing business is just saving as much as you can resisting spending money all at once and having the discipline to say I’m not going to buy this nice thing today instead I’m going to

have a better thing in the future and I’m going to buy my own Freedom too investing and looking after your own money is really simple in theory but you do have to get over the urge to impress other people with all your nice shiny things and there’s plenty of shiny things to buy this

reminds me of an important lesson from a simple path to wealth where the main takeaway is spend less than you make and invest the rest now it sounds easy but you’ve just got to do it over many many years to actually get anywhere there’s so many people who want a shortcut to all of this

and to get rich quick but the more you look into it the more you realize it’s a marathon not a Sprint and having the basics under control cannot be stressed enough I’ve also done my own Guide to Investing For Beginners too so feel free to go back and watch that one when you’re

done with this CashNews.co anyway as a bit of a bonus speaking about beginners and getting your foundation solid here’s two UK specific books I’d recommend first up big shout out to fellow YouTuber and professional financial planner Pete Matthews now he’s published the meaningful

money handbook and this is a great overview of everything that you need to know in terms of saving money Budgeting and investing retirement planning and even life Insurance and best of all it’s UK Focus because pretty much everything else out there is

us-based and although most things are Universal there’s lots of areas out there that are unique to the UK so go support your fellow UK folks if you want already and speaking about another little UK gem this book called money a user’s guide is great super small you can read it in just a

few nights if you take your time with it and it’s packed with great info and it’s written from the perspective of someone who’s been through the same Journey as most of us where we weren’t taught only the basics at school by our parents we get let loose in the world

we’re expected to just find our way so honestly nice and easy to read highly recommended and it’s four pounds on Amazon honestly I will say that books are criminally undervalued for the money that you pay I know they aren’t the most exciting topic and lots of people have probably

Switched Off already but the amount of value you can get is crazy now I tend to do all of my reading just before bed so if you’re quite a busy person you don’t have much time honestly rather than Doom scrolling on social media keep a book handy and even with 30 minutes an hour each

night or something like that you’ll get through loads and it does help me to get to sleep at least so worth giving that a try okay well how do we get rich then that’s what I actually wanted to know and now that we’ve covered off the basics what are the lessons from the best

investors this is where things get interesting because as I mentioned earlier I thought that the more I’d learn would mean that I’d become a better stock picker I’ll just get better returns and I’ll put myself way ahead of other people but actually here’s what happened

you might have seen this graph before it’s called The dunning-kruger Curve and it shows how we can overestimate our ability and knowledge about a topic without being a true expert so you start out here knowing very little and then once you learn a bit you start to gain confidence so in the

investing world this can happen very fast once you understand the basics about index funds how the market works and what types of account there are you can start to feel very knowledgeable I think some people in 2020 and 2021 got here very quickly reminding us of the saying that everyone is a

genius in a bull market now the next part is really interesting and for me this is is when we start to get into the more intermediate books where we’re now talking investing strategies tips and picking stocks now I don’t mean that they’re hard to read I just mean that you kind of

need to be interested in the topic otherwise it might be a bit boring once you start to look into the data investing and what it takes to be a good stock picker for me personally made me realize how little I know and actually made me question a lot more about my own strategy and my own level of

conviction here’s what I mean I’ll show you first so there’s some great books here and I recommend all of them if you really are into investing Ben Graham’s intelligent investor is certainly a must read but it’s a bit dry and it’s pretty old so you’re not

really going to get the most up-to-date examples but the principles are really important and ultimately if you’re a student of Warren Buffett then you’re a student of Ben Graham as he really is considered the father of value investing you get all the detail all the metrics and what to

look out for in the Financial Statements then as a great follow-up on and another legendary investor Peter Lynch’s book one up on Wall Street is a great read and he’s one of the best investors of all time there’s countless lessons in here and actually this is the

best place to find them because he didn’t actually do a huge amount of interviews back in the day you might find some clips on YouTube but they’re pretty old still very useful but the rest of the lessons are all in here lots of practical steps from Lynch he’s a real Champion for

the retail investor that he reckons you or me can beat the Stock Market if we just make sure that we lean into our own Edge and also that we know what we own and why we own it I’ll always remember how Peter says that when he was at parties or speaking with groups of people

that were like doctors or dentists or something that they’d invest in sectors that had nothing to do with their own industry whereas he reckons they should have focused on products that they use or own for example the stuff they actually used inside their own business it’s got loads of

examples like Dunkin Donuts Walmart and Kellogg’s so for example here’s an interesting quote long shots almost never pay off no matter how bad things get people still eat corn flakes just remember that one the next time you’re about to invest in the next hot stock promising to

change the world one thing I’d say here is that Lynch is a strange examples that when he left running the Magellan fund it had thousands of companies inside it so it’s not like a lot of advice that you get saying that you should concentrate your Investments in just a

few names something that Buffett does with Berkshire Hathaway I’m not sure how many people can really manage that kind of size of Portfolio but maybe that’s another CashNews.co on its own entirely I’ve also read books from Howard marks and Joel Greenblatt two

other famous names in the investing World both whom have amazing track records beating the market for a really long time now Marx is famous for writing his memo that’s really really interesting you can actually subscribe to it and he made his money in the distressed Debt

market so basically makes money when companies are in trouble and takes on the risk when times are bad for everyone else then Greenblatt another hugely famous investor talks a lot in his book about companies who split apart what to look out for in special situations when you’re trying to

invest now I’ve put these two together because before reading these kinds of books I was expecting there to be more of a concrete formula to invest you know you do this you do that and then you sit back and you just make money but virtually all the best investors in the world are effectively

outliers they don’t go with the crowd they operate in an area where they can have an advantage or an edge and they find opportunity opportunities where there’s less competition and they certainly don’t just YOLO into the single hot stock that everyone already seems to know about

in him and this makes a lot of sense so think about it like this if you want to beat the Stock Market and get more than you might do by using an index fund and your Portfolio will have to look very different to the market either very concentrated in a few names or

maybe in some companies that very few people have heard of because you need to be able to find those winners that everyone hasn’t yet found and remember this is very competitive too so this got me thinking a bit how much of this is skill how much of this is luck and can we replicate it if

Lionel Messi wrote a book on how to be good at football or Michael Jordan wrote the same on basketball would reading it help you I mean how many kids want to be pro athletes singers actors and all the rest obviously loads of people but very few will get to the top and fewer will stay there for a

very very long time so what makes the people at the top stay so long then and what part is in our control and what can be learned now I honestly don’t know the answer but I will say that these people are the top of the game and they are the massive outliers too and the reality still shows

that most people fail to beat the market in fact speaking of this whole topic you’ve got another great read by Burton malkiel a random walk down Wall Street and he pretty much goes through the machine of the #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance industry showing us that it’s just there to generate fees take commissions and most of the time retail investors lose money by trying to beat the market and even the professionals can’t do it consistently again it also comes back to

the subject of mindset and how important that is that time and time again we end up chasing the hot stock of the day or fast money but that doesn’t really exist and where it does very few people come out on top a big shout out as well to this book I should have really mentioned this one

earlier but John bogle’s Little Red Book here on Common Sense investing is such a good read it’s great to really get you up to speed on index funds because you don’t understand what they are and why they’re so important to investors you are missing out anyway I’ve

missed so much out here and there’s loads of other books I’ve been reading I’ll definitely do some more CashNews.cos on the topic if you’re interested so please do let me know Down Below in that comment section I’d love to hear your recommendations too as to what I

should read next let me leave you with this thought then going back to that Dunning Kruger curve I’m probably somewhere in this deep crevice not sure what side I’m on yet but one thing I’ve realized from all of this reading is that there are no Shortcuts To Success when it comes

to investing or building a business good things come to those who wait and if there was a secret formula we’d all be doing it which would then end up defeating the whole thing anyway as much as I feel much more comfortable looking at Financial Statements and some of the

numbers behind the company even the best investors still get it wrong a lot of the time and so much is outside of our control investing is an art not a science but you can tilt the brush in your favor by stopping yourself interfering too much and taking your emotions out of it which is always much

easier said than done anyway leave a like on the way out subscribe for more as always happy investing