Review: One Hour Investor

22 Sep 2019 at 20:41 // under Reviews Books Money

This post is a review of One Hour Investor by Vishal Reddy and published by TCK Publishing.

Disclosure: I was sent an electronic review copy of the book.

I was initially put off by the way the book was being markted. "Become an investment genius in just one hour!" - I think the first email went straight in the spam folder. I was certainly not interested in anything that sounded like a get rich quick scheme. But the second email was written differently and made me reconsider.

I complained several months ago about a company offering"financial education" when what they actually were trying to sell was an expensive active fund/management service. Since then I have done a fair bit of reading, though I felt that there were still a number of large gaps in my knowledge about this area.

This book has filled that gap. It has covered lots of terms you hear batted around like stocks and bonds, mutual funds and ETFs. While I felt like I knew what most of these were, it was nice to have the terms clearly explained in one place.

It is a short book, just over 100 pages. It definitely took me longer than an hour to read though I don't know how much was down to me getting interrupted, how much was because I like to truly understand what I am reading and how much was because I am dyslexic.

While the book aims to provide jargon free guidance, it did seem to jump into into talking about principles and interest while spending a fair amount of time explaining compound interest. I think anyone who knows the terms principal and interest (while talking about money) will probably already be familiar with the concept of compound interest. That said, I think the rest of the book was pretty good at explaining the stock market, bonds and other investment terms.

I fear that the book made the concept of individual stock picking look easy and didn't state the benefits of index funds as clearly as it could have done. I consider the book useful for explaining the terms, though I would not consider any of the advice in the book of much use.

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