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Cautionary tales for the modern investor by Aberdeen Asset Management

The full title of this book from Aberdeen Asset Management  is

Cautionary tales for the modern investor: The seven deadly sins of multi-asset investing“.

In my review on Amazon.co.uk, I rated the book at the Four Stars level. This means I think it is Good.

Here is my book review.

A good read if it is still free

I was sceptical of this short book because I’m cynical of the fund management industry. I keep seeing arguments to buy (stocks are going out so don’t miss out or alternatively, stocks have gone down so grab yourself a bargain) and I thought this would be similar propaganda.

It’s actually quite helpful since it’s based on the seven deadly sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – seen through the perspective of investments.

The only one I’d quibble with is envy which is connected to index benchmarks. Certainly active investment managers should not waste clients money doing the job of a much cheaper index tracker but for the private investor, index trackers have a lot to recommend them, as shown by how few active managers beat them over the long term. I’d also quibble with the idea of just judging performance against a risk free return. We don’t invest in active funds on the expectation that it will underperform but it is a perfectly valid performance assessment. I’d say that the first task of any assessment of savings and investment has to be whether it’s beaten a fair assessment of inflation.

There’s much more that could have been written in this book and if it wasn’t available for free, I’d have knocked it down to 3 stars but since there is no charge, I’ve given it four stars.

It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

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