Canadian Capitalist

The Romans said nosce te ipsum - “know thyself” and in this excellent new book, Dan Ariely, describes experiments that illuminate aspects of human behaviour that are, in turns, surprising, delightful, amusing and yes, even disturbing. Subtitled “The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions”, the author who is a professor at MIT says that we [...]

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Sometimes authors or publishers offer to send me a book for a possible review. I usually accept with every intention of reading the book and writing a review. Unfortunately, as I didn’t have the time to read the following books - I didn’t get past the first chapter on two of the books and skimmed [...]

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After reading a note on Jon Chevreau’s blog, I asked the author Francis D’Andrade for a review copy of the book, which is titled after the question most frequently asked of the author. Mr. D’Andrade has written an unusual personal finance book that talks a lot about the emotional aspects of money in a humorous, [...]

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I borrowed this book (affiliate link) from the local library after reading Jon Chevreau’s interview with one of the authors - Ziv Bodie. Prof. Bodie and co-author Michael Clowes suggest that investors would be better off eschewing equity risk and investing their savings in inflation-protected instruments such as real-return bonds.
There is a lot to [...]

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With traditional pension plans covering less and less numbers of Canadians, RRSPs are supposed to take their place. But, a significant number of Canadians don’t even have a RRSP and only a tiny fraction contribute the maximum every year. One of the reasons for this sad state of affairs is a lack of awareness - [...]

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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 [...]

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How is that we can sometimes be pretty stupid with our money? We tend to sell winning stocks too early, hold losing stocks too long, regret the stocks we didn’t buy (think Apple or RIM), regret the stocks we did buy (think Nortel or JDS-Uniphase), play the 6/49 despite the lousy odds, believe we are [...]

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In his book, Active Value Investing, Vitaliy Katsenelson makes a compelling argument that equity markets are now trapped in a range-bound market that he estimates will last until 2020 or so. In the first part of the book, he makes the case that secular bull markets are usually followed by secular range-bound markets, in which [...]

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First off, I would like to thank the author Danielle Park for furnishing a copy of her book for review. A lawyer and money manager, Ms. Park likens investing, which can be remarkably volatile and full of risk, to lit dynamite and a money manager’s role to that of a professional dynamite juggler. There is [...]

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William Bernstein, a practising physician, has written an excellent guide to investing (affiliate link) that contains important (as the sub-title says) “lessons for building a winning portfolio”. The four pillars that the title refers to are theory, history, psychology and business of investing.
Often, books on investing are dry and reading them is a bit like [...]

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