The Long and the Short of It
John Kay
McGraw-Hill £11.99, 300 pages
ISBN 9780954809324
It’s always refreshing to read a book about investing that doesn’t address the market like an infallible potentate who must be treated with reverence. John Kay’s book, The Long and the Short of It, certainly doesn’t promote the market as greater than us, the mere investors. It is a clear-sighted manual for sensible, rational people who want to run their own investments properly and are wondering where to start.
His book is subtitled Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Are Not in the Industry and the necessity for the reader to be ‘normally intelligent’ is clear from the start. You don’t have to have a lot of understanding of investing principles to glean the main points from Kay’s book, but it helps to have a working knowledge of the basics.
Kay’s style is highly readable, but he is an economics professor and therefore can’t stop himself regularly using terms that would be over the heads of the average layman. However, he deals with investing principles in a clear, intelligent and often humorous way.
The really great thing about Kay’s approach to investing, and to financial institutions in particular, is that, like Warren Buffett’s, it is intelligently irreverent and laconically wise. That’s why I have been a subscriber to his blog (www.johnkay.com) for some time. The man speaks more wisdom than most and occasionally makes one smile.
The Long and the Short of It was written before the financial meltdown of 2008 but even at that stage Kay was warning investors to make up their own minds and beware the conflicting interests of the so-called ‘advisers’ who were proffering tainted ‘help’.
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