Thursday, April 06, 2006

Book review part II

My last post was a quick review of three books...being short on time I did not go into too much detail. One of the books,



I plan on doing a very indepth review of because I know it is popular and the hot thing right now, hopefully will have this fdone by the weekend.

But I wanted to talk about this book



a little more.

While as a book reader I did not think it was a great read, that does nt mean I did not learn anything or failed to take away ideas form the book. On the contrary several points in the book were actualy quite valuable, they just dont go into very much detail.

Charlie Munger is quoted several times in the book as setting forth why he exactly set out to invest or as some would say become rich. Mr. Munger simply said he did it so he could be independant,

or to put it more vulgar, he was looking for F-U money (this is the little known accounting term which is deifned has having enough money so that you can tell anybody F-U).

And I get what he is saying. If you think about some of the most succesful self made people in the world, they dont accumalate wealth for wealth's sake, they actually set out to do something they love. While the money is nice their passion and drive is fueled by some other motivation. In Mr. Munger's case his goal was to collect money so he could secure his freedom, so to speak.

So I think that it is a very important lesson, and one which I will elaborate on in more detail later on, as it forms a cornerstone of why I am investing.

But for now I will leave you with this thought, as a new investor I think that a good thing to ask before you invest, or at least invest large sums, is why exactly are you investing? other than the hope of having more money down the road than you have now.

because I think that if you have some sort of idea of why you are investing, then that will help you be more succesful because when you are deciding in what it is you wish to invest in, you can ask yourself, how does this investment fit with my goal and does it help me reach my goal? or better yet how does this investment put my goal at risk of not being reached? (as Munger/Buffett teache (from Einstein I believe) you must always invert).

So that is what I learned from this book. Like I said while I did not like the book as a book to read (for me a good book is one that you dont want to put down because you cant wait to see whats on the next page) I do recommend it because it does have a few key points from Munger which may help you better orient your investing mindset.