![[Front cover of Your Money & Your Brain]](http://www.canadiancapitalist.com/images/books/no_hype.jpg)
Though I don’t necessarily agree that her approach to picking individual stocks is suitable for a beginning investor, it is easy to see why author Gail Bebee has earned plaudits from Ellen Roseman, Larry MacDonald, Jon Chevreau and others. This self-published, slim book running a mere 194 pages largely delivers on the promise to provide its readers with the knowledge to “cut through the investment industry hype and profitably invest your hard-earned money”. Ms. Bebee is not a financial insider; she has a graduate degree in engineering and relates a regrettably common experience on how she became a d-i-y investor after she learned that her RRSPs were best investments for her broker, not her family.
A newbie investor would find the book invaluable as no prior familiarity with investing is assumed. Ms. Bebee starts with the basics (rule of 72, compounding etc.), talks about service providers such as financial advisors, progresses to asset classes, dishes out the dirt on cash, bonds, stocks, mutual funds, ETFs etc. and finally discusses RRSPs, RESPs and model portfolios. You can find the full Table of Contents on her website.
I do have a few quibbles with her book. I cringed when I read the section on “Ten Steps to Select Winning Stocks” and an entire chapter on market timing. Also, a list of books for progressing beyond the Investing 101 stage would have been useful. Still, the list of positives found in the book far outweighs my nit picking. The book earns a strong recommendation just for the long list of investments (principal-protected notes, high-fee mutual funds, venture capital funds etc.) the author thinks are terrible for the average investor.
The book retails for $23.95 and is available from the author’s website.
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7 responses so far ↓
1 tyler // Dec 11, 2007 at 10:52 pm
i’d personally have a problem buying a book on investing from a website that looks like it was crafted for geocities in 1996.
2 Canadian Capitalist // Dec 12, 2007 at 9:04 am
tyler: I agree that the website could be better. Still, I wouldn’t judge a book from its website
3 CanadianInvestor // Jan 5, 2008 at 2:24 am
Hey CC, did you notice in her comments on my review of this book on my blog that the author Gail Bebee says she follows your blog? Maybe we can get her to change her mind on market timing and technical analysis!
4 Canadian Capitalist // Jan 7, 2008 at 9:58 am
Thanks for the note… I did check back your post for Gail’s comments. Though she didn’t leave a comment here, she did send me an email. I’ll ask her permission to post it…
5 Canadian Capitalist // Jan 7, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Here’s Gail’s comments on this post reprinted with permission:
“Thank you for your review. I appreciate you taking the time to read the book.
We obviously don’t agree on all aspects of investing. That is why investing is such a fascinating subject.
I do want to clarify that I am not advocating new investors buy stocks right away. I do suggest in the chapter on building investing plans that they start off with savings accounts and then mutual funds and only get into stocks once they have sufficient funds for adequate diversification.”
6 This and That // Jan 10, 2008 at 8:28 pm
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