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More reviews by Jake van der Kamp
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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The Winning Investment Habits of Warren Buffet & George Soros by Mark Tier
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Investment pundit MARK TIER spent years trying to unlock the secret of how to make money on the market, all of it to little avail. He never gave up, however. Instead he decided to learn from others, saw the light and now boasts greater success.
The THE WINNING INVESTMENT HABITS OF WARREN BUFFET & GEORGE SOROS is the result of this revelation on the road to Damascus and there are two reasons that it stands out from the normal run of the How-To-Get-Rich books offered in such large numbers.
The first is Tier's admission, repeated throughout, that he often failed in his past investment strategies. It may not seem much but humility is a good starting point in the investment business, all the more because it is so rare. Investment gurus do not dwell on their investment failures.
The second reason is the two names mentioned in the title. Warren Buffet grew rich as the archetypal American who needed not go far to understand the Everyman investor and consumer of the United States. He is that Everyman himself. George Soros is the market player who learned in Europe at a very early age how governments can be self-destructive and then put the knowledge to lucrative work betting against governments on the market.
What Tier makes evident is that these two men did not become rich by setting the goal of becoming rich above all other objectives. They play the game because they like the game. They like the rewards too but Warren Buffet spends very little of those rewards on himself while George Soros prefers the study of philosophy and says he sees the rewards only in terms of an entry to interesting environments. Neither of them is accidentally wealthy but, if they are to believed, and why bother with their thoughts if they are not, their purposes were always greater than gaining wealth.
This poses a conundrum for Tier. The book is pitched at the reader who seeks to emulate the ways of these two men in order to become as wealthy as they are. It sets out the investment techniques that they employ but underlying those techniques is a way of thinking about wealth that will be at odds with the reader's if his objective goes no further than how to become wealthy.
Tier does his best to make it a How-To manual and it is a good best, as one could expect from a professional investor who is ready to confess his own mistakes. In the end, however, this book is probably best read as an understanding of human nature in the investment business.
Jake van der Kamp
19/11/2004
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