The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is probably the worst book of the personal-finance genre I have ever read, containing numerous bad advice and generally encouraging hubris instead of prudence in financial decision-making (in the name of entrepreneurism). I did, however, pick up one useful lesson from it: In finance, you need to pay to get quality advice.
This piece of advice is actually not so self-evident in this age of information, where we can switch on the fire-hose of information on many topics of interest with a simple Google search. My view is that 99% of the free finance journalism one can get via web search and news sites are basically junk, produced by different parties usually not with the best interest of the reader in mind. Even broker reports that are typically only available to institutional investors (for free) are usually tainted with deep biases, not surprising given their whole objective in life is to get investors to trade more and more. To get quality financial journalism, you have to pay for it.
Here is a list of sites I subscribe to and can recommend:
- Intelligent Investor Share Advisor: http://www.intelligentinvestor.com.au
- Barrons: http://www.barrons.com
- Financial Times: http://www.ft.com
- Value Investor Insight: http://www.valueinvestorinsight.com
In the context of Asian investing, I sometimes read the newsletter from http://icapital.biz, but I find it to be biased and opinionated (in an annoying way) on many economic and geopolitical matters. I only read the detailed stock research section, preferring to ignore the general market comments and senseless charting sections.
I was told the Grant’s Interest Rate Observer is great but I don’t subscribe to it because it is relatively expensive. One can get many of James Grant’s key insights from his books instead, and I do recommend them.
I mentioned earlier that 99% of free finance journalism are crap. Here is a selection of the 1% that I think are worth reading regularly. They are mostly commentaries from established value investing houses.
- The Journal by the Platinum Asset Management team: https://www.platinum.com.au/Journal/
- Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/reports.html
- Leucadia’s Letters to Shareholders: http://www.leucadia.com/toc_c-p_letters.html
- Bristlemouth: http://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/
- Value Invest Asia: http://www.valueinvestasia.com
- Quartz: http://qz.com
Learn and enjoy!
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